See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/321213023

Automated Daily Maintenance Planning for Offshore Wind Farms

Article in Renewable Energy · September 2018

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2018.08.112

CITATIONS READS

16 300

2 authors:

Clym Stock-Williams Siddharth Krishnaswamy

ECN part of TNO ECN, Petten
10 PUBLICATIONS 385 CITATIONS 2 PUBLICATIONS 16 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Daily Offshore Wind Farm Maintenance Scheduling Decisions: Design and Valuation of Support Tools View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Clym Stock-Williams on 24 September 2018.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 Renewable Energy xxx (2018) 1e11

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Renewable Energy
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/renene

Automated daily maintenance planning for offshore wind farms

Clym Stock-Williams*, Siddharth Krishna Swamy
ECN part of TNO, Westerduinweg 4, Petten, the Netherlands

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Offshore wind farm managers and schedulers need to manage large numbers of wind turbine visits every
Received 16 October 2017 day, in order to: repair minor faults; conduct inspections; and perform scheduled service operations.
Received in revised form Daily schedules form a choice of which maintenance activities to conduct, taking account of: constraints
29 August 2018
on weather conditions, shifts, vessel and technician capabilities and availability; and the impact of ac-
Accepted 31 August 2018
tivities on wind farm profitability. This forms a formidable optimisation challenge that today is solved “by
Available online xxx
hand” by a scheduler.
The work presented here contains three aspects of importance. First, a powerful and flexible meta-
Keywords:
Optimisation
heuristic optimisation model is developed to solve this problem, where the simulation algorithms and
Genetic algorithms objective can be altered without any change to the optimiser. Second, a practical valuation methodology
Offshore wind farms is developed, where historic wind farm data can be used to identify strengths and weaknesses in any
Daily maintenance maintenance planning method and estimate financial return on investment from implementation.
Operations & maintenance Finally, the methodology described is implemented and tested, by applying the valuation methodology to
data from the Princess Amalia Wind Park in The Netherlands. Even given the limited scope of this case
study, automating daily maintenance planning can bring significant financial benefits: 302 kV over 5
months.
© 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction to offshore wind farm daily maintenance scheduling these operations by hand, according to the process
planning displayed in Fig. 1 and explained below.

The offshore wind industry has recently seen a noticeable in-
crease in its cost competitiveness, with some of the most recent
sites for development being won with bids of zero subsidy. This is
partly driven by site economics and partly by the expectation of
innovations, both to reduce the levelised cost of constructing and
operating these farms and to increase revenue [6]. Since Operations
& Maintenance (O&M) costs have typically accounted for around
17% of an offshore wind farm's levelised cost of energy (or V25/
MWh) [18], these innovations must include efforts to optimise asset
performance.
There has been significant effort over the past 15 years to
address “long-term” O&M decision making: where choices about
vessels, ports, technicians and major maintenance and inspection
intervals are made [9]. In this work, however, a different aspect of
O&M is addressed: the scheduling of maintenance activities on a
daily basis, making best use of the resources made available.
Companies operating wind farms currently do so on the basis of
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: clym.stock-williams@tno.nl (C. Stock-Williams).
1. Each morning, the manager of a wind farm gets a list from their
Asset Management system of pending maintenance activities.
These we shall call Service Orders. They include issues such as
inspections, preventative repairs and corrective replacements,
each with their own set of actions and requirements for spares
and technician capabilities.
2. A Scheduler on the wind farm then creates a Transfer Plan,
which assigns Service Orders to teams of technicians, and places
them on vessels for the day's visit. Major interventions almost
always require different vessels and technicians to those avail-
able normally on the wind farm, and so can be scheduled
separately; however, they interfere with the normal mainte-
nance activities and so must be taken into account.
3. The Transfer Plan is put into action. However, it rarely turns out
exactly as expected at the beginning of the day. Complications in
the weather conditions (and inaccuracies in the weather fore-
cast) may mean that some turbines are inaccessible, or some
technicians are too seasick to perform work. In addition, tasks
may take a different length of time to expectation, perhaps due
to a mis-diagnosis or even lack of necessary equipment.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2018.08.112
0960-1481/© 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article in press as: C. Stock-Williams, S.K. Swamy, Automated daily maintenance planning for offshore wind farms, Renewable
Energy (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2018.08.112
2 C. Stock-Williams, S.K. Swamy / Renewable Energy xxx (2018) 1e11
Fig. 1. A schematic of the offshore wind farm daily maintenance process.
4. Upon return of the vessel to port, Service Orders which have
been worked on are now updated in the Asset Management
system. In some companies, these data may be used to update
the time estimates used for scheduling that class of mainte-
nance action in the future.
5. Before the office closes, a preliminary Transfer Plan may be
made for the next day, which will be altered the next morning
subject to a new weather forecast and any events occurring on
the wind farm overnight.
As larger wind farms are built, the manual approach to step 2
becomes infeasible for even the most experienced operators: as an
example, there are more than 3.6 million possible orderings of 10
maintenance tasks. To this must be added possible choices of ves-
sels, assignments of technicians, and uncertainties about the
weather. Artificial Intelligence therefore has the potential to sup-
port this process, by identifying high-quality Transfer Plans and
accounting automatically for the many interacting variables and
uncertainties.
The goal of this paper is to develop a practical and flexible
approach to solving this problem. Since the future degradation of
wind farm components is rarely understood, and such information
is not available to the Scheduler, a formulation of the problem is
developed which treats the impact of delaying work conservatively.
In Section 2, key requirements and a valuation methodology are
defined, in order to estimate the benefits of any such tool to a wind
farm operator.
Section 3 then reviews the previous attempts to solve this
problem, before outlining a new approach, which builds on the
capabilities of modern offshore wind farm operations simulation
tools.
Finally, in Section 4 a case study is presented, where for the first
time several months of historic data from a real offshore wind farm
are used, to value the difference between historic human sched-
uling practices and fully autonomous scheduling. This case study is
more limited in scope than the methodology presented, but dem-
onstrates the potential benefits on a representative wind farm.
2. Valuing the impact of decision support tools
The expense of installing a new decision support tool requires a
business case: an estimate of the likely benefits in terms of
increased income or reduced costs. Here we answer the call from
Dawid et al. [5] to develop a robust methodology for quantitative
estimation of the advantages of decision support tools using his-
torical data.
A direct comparison needs to be made between historical de-
cisions (the Transfer Plans recorded) and those which would be
generated by a daily maintenance planning tool. For a true com-
parison, a situation of identical knowledge must be created. It is left
an open question whether the workflow must be identical to the
historical case (e.g. one decision is taken per day at 6p.m. the night
before) or whether additional advantages can be allowed from an
improved workflow (e.g. Transfer Plans can be adjusted three times
per day). In any case, the comparison must be made on the same
Please cite this article in press as: C. Stock-Williams, S.K. Swamy, Automated daily maintenance planning for offshore wind farms, Renewable
Energy (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2018.08.112
basis as the optimisation objective (i.e. energy output or net
income).
To achieve this objective, the following valuation methodology
is proposed, which accounts for uncertainties and errors in his-
torical data:
1. Planning Step. The tool is run using only information available
at that time, e.g. weather forecasts, estimates of time required
for each Service Order.
2. Transfer Plan Selection Step. The Transfer Plan to be used that
day is chosen according to the desired process (for automation,
the Plan with the highest score could be automatically chosen).
3. Implementation Step. This Transfer Plan is then evaluated us-
ing a wind farm simulator, using the actual weather experienced
(not the forecast weather) to evaluate the objective for
comparison.
4. Update Step. The status of the open Service Orders is updated
with the work achieved, in order to initialise the state of the
wind farm at the time of the next optimisation.
5. Continuous Repetition. This (semi-)autonomous wind farm
scheduling is continued for a long time period (preferably at
least a year), in order to understand the long-term performance
of the optimiser.
By also evaluating the historical Transfer Plans according to step
3, the relative performance of the decision support tool can be
calculated.
3. Optimisation approach
3.1. Existing literature
Daily maintenance scheduling is not unique to the offshore wind
farm sector (see e.g. Ref. [16]). However, the problem outlined in
section 1 does contain some unique features, in particular the
dependence of both the activities and the outcomes on the weather.
The earliest published wind farm schedule optimisation papers
address onshore wind. Although these solutions are not immedi-
ately applicable to offshore wind, mainly due to the lack of trans-
port vehicles, these papers illustrate the two possible optimisation
paradigms. Kovacs et al. [11] use exact optimisation (Mixed Integer
Programming), while Fonseca et al. [7] use metaheuristic methods.
A number of solutions and tools for offshore wind farm daily
maintenance optimisation have been published in recent years.
Table 1 summarises these, and includes this work for comparison.
It is clear that all previous approaches, except for Zhang et al.
[23], applied exact optimisation; and all previous studies developed
equations and inequalities to determine the value of each possible
solution to the problem. While these representations have in some
cases been very sophisticated, they still do not fully represent
reality.
Given the availability of complex offshore operations simulation
engines, the authors believe that coupling them with meta-
heuristics offers a more practical solution to this problem for in-
dustrial use:
 C. Stock-Williams, S.K. Swamy / Renewable Energy xxx (2018) 1e11 3

Table 1
Summary of published offshore wind farm daily maintenance schedule optimisation models.

Zhang Dai et al. Stålhane et al. Dawid et al. Tan et al. Raknes et al. Irawan et al. Stock-Williams
[23] [3] [19] [5] [20] [17] [10] et al.

Multiple vessels ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✕ ✓ ✓ ✓
Multiple ports ✕ ✕ ✕ (✓)a ✕ ✕ ✓ ✓
Multiple Service Orders per turbine ✕ ✕ ✓ ✓ ✕ ✓ (✓)b ✓
Multiple Service Orders per technician team ✕ ✕ ✕ ✓ (✓)c ✕ ✕ (✓)
Variable number of technicians per Service Order ✕ ✕ ✕ ✕ ✓ ✕ ✕ ✓
Multiple technician types ✕ ✕ ✕ ✕ ✕ ✕ ✓ ✓
Vessel carrying capacity ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✕ ✓ ✓ ✓
Spares and technician availability ✕ ✕ ✕ ✓ ✓ ✕ ✓ ✓
Preventative tasks ✕d ✕e ✓ ✕f ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Corrective tasks ✕ ✕ ✓ ✕ ✕ ✓ ✕ ✓
Accessibility calculated from weather ✕ ✕ ✕ ✕ ✓ ✓ ✕ ✓
Power output calculated from weather ✕ ✕ ✕ ✕ ✓ (✕)g ✕ ✓
Problem Definition [Equations (E)/Simulation (S)] E E E E E E E S
Solution Method [Exact (E)/Metaheuristic (M)] M E E Eh E E E M
Closure [User-defined Penalty (P)/Integrated (I)] P P P Pi ✕ P P I
Robust (optimisation includes uncertainty) ✕ ✕ ✕ ✕ ✕ ✕ ✕ (✓)j
Costs Objective ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Net Income Objective ✕ (✓) (✓) ✕ ✓ (✓) ✕ ✓
a
Feasible, although not demonstrated.
b
Achieved by adding extra “virtual” turbines.
c
It is unclear whether there are sufficient constraints on technicians to ensure realistic plans.
d
A penalty per day is applied for completing the task after a certain time.
e
See footnote 1.
f
The user must define a reward for visiting a turbine.
g
Assumes a constant wind speed for each shift.
h
Exhaustive search.
i
A reward for performing Service Orders.
j
A method is defined, but not demonstrated.

Metaheuristic optimisers treat the evaluation process as a black
box: they only have knowledge of how well each abstract rep-
resentation it has tried has performed. Therefore, changes can
be made to the objective, constraints or evaluator without
making any changes to the optimiser. In software architecture
this principle is known as “separation of concerns” [15].

Through the ability to couple to trusted evaluation software (or
even experiments) additional complexity of representation can
be included. It is of utmost importance that the optimiser is
solving the real-world problem, and it is much easier to prove
this when the users are already familiar with the evaluation
method.

With a careful choice of representation, the solution time can
scale more feasibly with the number of open Service Orders,
technicians and vessels available. This enables large and com-
plex wind farms to present few additional challenges to the
optimiser, beyond a lower probability of reaching the global
optimum.

While metaheuristics are not guaranteed to provide the optimal
solution, they do provide to the user a list of all the solutions
tried and their results, allowing immediate sensitivity analysis.
3.2. Introduction to the current methodology
optimisation. Each possible solution, or Individual, is encoded
into a Decision Vector: mathematically a vector of binary,
integer or real numbers. The generation rules mimic the process
of natural evolution, in that new Individuals can be generated
either randomly or through “cross-over” and “mutation” oper-
ators on existing Individuals selected from the Population
managed by the GA. By carefully choosing the hyperparameters
of the selection, cross-over and mutation operators, a good
balance can be found for a given problem between exploration
and convergence [21].
2. Conversion. The new Decision Vectors are each transformed
into a representation of the problem which makes sense in the
real world. Sometimes this is trivial, however, additional infor-
mation or assumptions often need to be added.
3. Evaluation. Each proposed solution is evaluated in order to
determine its Solution Vector: a set of numbers describing how
well it performs against the optimisation objective(s).
4. Re-insertion. These values are provided back to the GA, in order
to determine the fitness of the proposed solutions. The current
Population is then updated in order to improve its quality (based
on rules, for example that the new Individual replaces the cur-
rent worst if it has better fitness), before checking for conver-
gence. If the optimisation needs to continue, then new solutions
are generated, returning to the beginning of the loop.

In this study we apply Genetic Algorithms (GAs) to the job of
finding the best possible Transfer Plans from the very large set of
possible options.
GAs are from the family of metaheuristic global optimisation
algorithms, which decompose the search process into a loop over
four main steps [8]:
1. Generation. Using rules, a GA proposes new solutions to the
problem, based on the set of parameters made available for
This process is shown in Fig. 2. This figure includes Conversion
and Evaluation details specific to daily maintenance scheduling,
intended to aid understanding in the following sections. A simple
logic for applying GAs to this problem is described in section 3.3, in
order to introduce the concepts. Then, a more powerful represen-
tation is developed in section 3.4. Finally, the complexities involved
in evaluating the performance of Transfer Plans are explored in
section 3.5.

Please cite this article in press as: C. Stock-Williams, S.K. Swamy, Automated daily maintenance planning for offshore wind farms, Renewable
Energy (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2018.08.112
4 C. Stock-Williams, S.K. Swamy / Renewable Energy xxx (2018) 1e11

Fig. 2. The process involved in completing one iteration of a Genetic Algorithm search, with details specific to the offshore wind farm daily maintenance scheduling problem.

3.3. Service order prioritisation

a
In this section, we will only allow the optimiser to alter the order
in which the open Service Orders are performed. Although the details
of the weather and time taken by the vessels to visit the turbines
are essential, they cannot be optimised, therefore they will be
considered only in the evaluator (see section 3.5.1).

3.3.1. Abstract representation

The first step, in order to design and tune the hyperparameters
of the GA, is to identify an abstract form of the problem to be solved.
Service Order prioritisation (and indeed the more complex
problem solved in section 3.4) is in the class of Vehicle Routing
problems; in particular it is equivalent to the “Travelling Salesman
Problem” (TSP) [4]. In this problem, shown in Fig. 3, there are k
cities c1;::;k , each located at li ¼ ðxi ;yi Þ. A salesman starts at his home
b, location lb ¼ ðxb ; yb Þ and must visit each city once only before
returning home, forming a route:

 b
R ¼ b; ci1 ; …; cik ; b

Adjacent cities on the merchant's route are separated by a dis-

 
tance di;j ¼ lj  li , and so the goal of the optimisation is to find
the shortest Hamiltonian cycle:

X
kþ1
Ropt ¼ argmin di1;i
R
i¼1

In our problem, the cities represent the Service Orders, not the
turbines. The cost associated with the total length of the route is the
total energy lost by the wind farm (if we wish to retain a mini-
misation problem).
As has been covered multiple times in the literature (see
Refs. [1,12]) this can be solved with a GA using a permutation
Fig. 3. The Travelling Salesman Problem, an abstract problem equivalent to Service
encoding: Order prioritisation. (a) problem set-up; (b) an example solution.

Decision Vector: The same length as the number of Service

Orders, with a unique set of integers representing the Service
Orders, e.g. ½1; 2; 3; 4; 5; 6.

Population Size: Trials show that a population size of approx-
imately 100 individuals results in the best trade-off between
speed of convergence and exploration (i.e. probability of finding
the global optimum).

Selection: Parents are selected through a standard roulette
wheel, where an Individual is selected with a chance in pro-
portion to its fitness.

Cross-over: Only operators which result in new permutations of
the original set are allowed, i.e. no integer may be repeated. The
best choices of operator are ones which allow information

Please cite this article in press as: C. Stock-Williams, S.K. Swamy, Automated daily maintenance planning for offshore wind farms, Renewable
Energy (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2018.08.112
 C. Stock-Williams, S.K. Swamy / Renewable Energy xxx (2018) 1e11 5

which is relevant to the performance of the solution to be

passed on to the next generation [21]. The PMX or OX1 cross-
a
over operators [12] work well in this respect.

Mutation: The best choice of operator has a random chance ðlÞ
of swapping two locations in the Decision Vector, since this also
cannot result in an illegal Decision Vector. Trials show that
lz10% works well.

3.3.2. Conversion to Transfer Plan

The Decision Vector is converted directly into the list of Service
Orders for the Transfer Plan. Then technicians must be allocated to
each Service Order. The most logical assumption is that all the
available technicians are allocated evenly, but in priority order:
respecting the minimum and maximum number of technicians
allowed to work on any particular Service Order. In this manner, the
lower-priority Service Orders are likely to have no technicians
allocated today and so can be removed from the Transfer Plan.
Multiple vessels can be handled by creating a Decision Vector of
length SV, where V is the number of vessels and S is the number of
open Service Orders. Zeros are used to fill out the SðV  1Þ elements
and are removed while creating a Transfer Plan for each vessel. This
clearly scales inefficiently; and will be handled in a more elegant
manner in section 3.4.2.
b
3.4. Service order resource allocation

Service Order prioritisation has some limitations, in particular

that (assuming the weather and other hard constraints allow it) all
the technicians available every day will be used. This means that
the optimiser cannot choose whether to:

1. Delay work until later in order to take advantage of times with

lower wind speed; or to
2. Assign varying numbers of technicians to Service Orders, for
instance to account for the different amounts of times required
to complete them.

Instead we wish to allow the optimiser to vary both the order in

which the open Service Orders are performed and how many techni-
cians are assigned to each Service Order. In this way, Service Orders
can be delayed to a future day either by assigning zero technicians,
or by assigning a low enough priority.
Fig. 4. The Travelling Merchant Problem, an abstract problem equivalent to Service
Order resource allocation. (a) problem set-up; (b) an example solution.
3.4.1. Abstract representation
In order to find an abstract representation of this problem to
rate of s people/hour, gaining an income of q from each sale, then
tune the optimiser, we return to the TSP described in section 3.3.1.
the merchant's income after ti hours in city i is:
However, now we allow ourselves to notice that the salesman ap-
pears not to spend any time selling at each city. A problem is Ii ¼ minðs$ti ; pi Þ$q
therefore developed - a variation on the Travelling Purchaser
Problem [2] which has not previously been considered in the However, the merchant must return home before a certain
Vehicle Routing literature to the best knowledge of the authors - amount of time t has elapsed. Given that the merchant's transport
which we shall call the “Travelling Merchant Problem” (TMP). has a certain speed v, this means that the that the time spent selling
As shown in Fig. 4, the cities previously described now have plus the time spent travelling must not exceed the total time
varying populations pk of potential customers. Instead of having to allowance, giving the following constraint:
visit every city, unlike the unfortunate salesman, the merchant can
choose which r cities to visit, forming a route similar to that 1 Xr X
r1
$ dj1;j þ tj  t
considered previously: v j¼2 j¼2


R ¼ b; ci1 ; …; cir ; b The objective of the problem is to choose the optimum route
that maximises the merchant's income in the time available:
i2½1; …; k ( )
X
r
At each city, the merchant can then choose to spend a certain Iopt ¼ max minðs$ti ; pi Þ$q
amount of time ti selling his wares. If the merchant sells at a steady i¼1

Please cite this article in press as: C. Stock-Williams, S.K. Swamy, Automated daily maintenance planning for offshore wind farms, Renewable
Energy (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2018.08.112
6 C. Stock-Williams, S.K. Swamy / Renewable Energy xxx (2018) 1e11

Since the TSP is NP-hard, the TMP is also at least NP-hard. One
possible solution approach is to solve a TSP for each possible sub-
set of cities, then allocate selling time through solving the Contin-
uous Knapsack Problem.
In this problem, the cities are again analogous to the Service
Orders, and the time spent selling is equivalent to the allocation of
technician resource.
Solving this efficiently using a GA requires a different approach
to that taken in section 3.3.1:

Decision Vector: The challenge is to represent both the order
and the resource allocation in one Decision Vector. One inter-
esting previous approach is to use a variable length Decision
Vector to determine which Service Orders are completed [13].
We also use a real-coded Decision Vector, but retain the more
common fixed length. Instead, the absolute value represents
both the priority and the position on a cumulative distribution
of resource. A reference ordering of the Service Orders (or cities)
is used for determining the conversion, as explained in section
3.4.2.

Population Size: Once again, a population size of approximately
100 individuals achieves good results.

Selection: Once again, a roulette wheel selection is used.

Cross-over: The standard two-point crossover [14] works well,
since it allows groups of Service Orders to retain both their
absolute positions and relative resource allocations.

Mutation: The best choice of operator has a chance (l) of adding
a random number drawn from a Normal distribution with mean
0 and variance s2 to one of the elements of the Decision Vector.
Trials show that sz0:2 and lz10% works well.
3.4.2. Conversion to Transfer Plan
The conversion of the Decision Vector to a Transfer Plan pro-
ceeds in three stages, which shall be explained with the aid of the
example shown in Fig. 5.
First, Service Orders are prioritised by sorting the reference list
by the values of the Decision Vector (smaller values have higher
priority). In the example, Service Order B has the value  0:6, so has
highest priority, whereas C comes last with a value of 1.4.
Next, technician resource is allocated through a cumulative
curve, such as the one shown in Fig. 6. As can be seen in the
example, Service Order B's Decision value is below 0, so it receives
no technician resource. This choice of conversion function provides
the optimiser with a region where Service Orders receive zero
resource and are therefore delayed beyond the current day. The
remaining three Service Orders have cumulative resource values of
30% (A), 80% (D) and 100% (C), meaning they receive 30%, 50% and
20% respectively of the day's available technicians.
Finally, this must be converted into integer values of technicians.
Many approaches are possible here. The one taken by the authors is
to fix the total amount of resource and then allocate those techni-
cians in order of most resource required (respecting the skill re-
quirements and minimum and maximum technician numbers for
each Service Order). Until all technicians are legally allocated, the
Service Order allocated the least resource has its share redis-
tributed to the others. Fig. 5 shows two examples of the outcome of
this, when 5 or 10 technicians are available (and when the mini-
mum number of technicians allowed to work on a Service Order is
2, and the maximum number is unrestricted).
In order to generate Transfer Plans which assign more than one
Service Order to a technician team, as is commonly seen in practice,
unallocated Service Orders can then be added (in order of most
resource) to existing activities for technician teams.

Fig. 5. Example Decision Vector conversion for Service Order resource allocation (far left: with one vessel and five technicians; middle: with one vessel and ten technicians; right:
with two vessels and ten technicians). The minimum number of technicians allowed to work on a Service Order is 2.

Fig. 6. Decision Vector conversion for Service Order resource allocation. See Fig. 5 for the use of the values associated with the Service Orders denoted A-F.

Please cite this article in press as: C. Stock-Williams, S.K. Swamy, Automated daily maintenance planning for offshore wind farms, Renewable
Energy (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2018.08.112
 C. Stock-Williams, S.K. Swamy / Renewable Energy xxx (2018) 1e11
Multiple vessels can be handled by extending the resource
conversion function, as shown by the dashed line in Fig. 6. Decision
values below 2 are assigned to the first vessel; values between 2
and 5 are assigned to the second, and so on. Mirroring the function,
rather than simply repeating it and creating a sudden jump at 2,
should ensure a smoother transition for the optimiser, as “high
resource” on vessel one will become the same on vessel two (and
vice versa for the transition from the second to third vessel). The
resulting allocation for two vessel case is illustrated on the right in
Fig. 5. 85% of the technicians are allocated in total in this case (the
sum of the converted Decision Vector values is 1.7 out of a possible
2) and then the technician allocation logic proceeds as before.
3.5. Evaluation of Transfer Plan performance
At this point, a Transfer Plan has been created, and must be
evaluated for its fitness. With some similarities to Raknes et al. [17],
we split the problem up into a detailed simulation of the current
day, followed by an evaluation of future costs. At no point are
artificial costs, rewards or restrictions imposed, therefore the
quality of the evaluation is based on the quality of the simulation
software used.
For simplicity, we shall consider the objective to be maximising
the total energy output of the wind farm.
3.5.1. Simulation and evaluation of current day
Transfer Plans allocate technician teams to vessels in priority
order, and each team is allocated tasks in priority order, as briefly
described in section 1. When a Transfer Plan is put into action, the
vessel first drops each team off in priority order at the turbines,
before returning to pick up teams once they have finished, in order
to take them to another turbine or back to port. A simulator should
be capable of the following logic in order to estimate the day's
activities:

Compliance with constraints on technician shift times, weather
accessibility, and the number of technicians allowed simulta-
neously onto a turbine.

Realistic mobilisation, transit, positioning, transfer, work and
break activities, for instance such that all technicians are
returned to port before the end of their shift. This can be ach-
ieved either in a separate planning step before the simulation, or
through reactive and/or proactive logic within the simulator
itself.

Calculating values for the amount of work achieved on each
Service Order and the energy produced by each turbine. For a
net income optimisation, the costs incurred - for example by
vessels and technicians - need also to be calculated.
The Solution Vector is a single value, in this example the total
energy output of the wind farm over the day.
3.5.2. Evaluation of future costs
In short-term optimisation it is essential that closure is ach-
ieved, i.e. that ’not doing something’ is always assigned a mean-
ingful cost. Here, we propose a simple approach, whereby all
Service Orders are, if possible, completed within the length of the
weather forecast. This means that the potential effects on the wind
farm of not performing maintenance (in particular further degra-
dation: where minor maintenance becomes major maintenance)
can be ignored.
Practically, this can be achieved in a simpler manner than with a
full simulator. It is recommended that a scheduler - which, for each
Service Order, searches through the remaining weather forecast
and calculates the minimum cost of completing it, abiding by all the
Please cite this article in press as: C. Stock-Williams, S.K. Swamy, Automated daily maintenance planning for offshore wind farms, Renewable
Energy (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2018.08.112
7
constraints - is sufficient, subject to some important
considerations:
1. This part of the evaluator must return the same cost for
completing a Service Order in the remaining days of the weather
forecast, as the simulator would in the first day (all other cir-
cumstances being equal)
2. The Service Orders must be assigned a default priority, other-
wise Transfer Plans which result in identical activities on the
current day could be evaluated to have more than one result,
since the optimiser assigns priorities also to Service Orders not
performed.
3. The evaluation must take into account the number of techni-
cians available in total, and used for each Service Order, in order
not to generate overly optimistic costs. This can be achieved by
making unavailable those times when the full number of tech-
nicians have already been allocated.
The choice of penalisation cost for work which cannot be
completed during the forecast period is important, in order to
achieve this balance and thus avoid a situation where the optimiser
always assumes that work can be done in the future. This is easily
diagnosable, since the list of open Service Orders will get pro-
gressively longer each day.
The correct choice for penalisation cost can be found by
considering a limit case: where work in the remaining forecast
window costs nothing (e.g. the wind speeds are below the cut-in of
the wind turbines); and there is a large amount of work open, such
that the time available during this period is completely allocated.
Then all work not done on the first day must automatically be
transferred beyond the end of the forecast period. We need to
ensure that the best solution the optimiser can find in this
circumstance involves working all the hours today (t1 ) that it
possibly can. If the average cost of doing an hour of work today is c1
and the penalty cost of doing an hour of work after the forecast
period is cx , then the following inequality concerning the amount of
work chosen to be done today (d1 ) must hold true:
t1 $c1 < d1 $c1 þ ðt1  d1 Þ$cx
Re-arranging, this shows that cx > c1 : the penalty cost must be
strictly higher than the cost of work on the first day. For the
objective of minimum energy loss, this can therefore be fixed at the
rated power of the turbine (plus a small amount).
Some Service Orders might be critical, in other words they must
be performed today or within a very few days to prevent breaking
regulations or further degradation. There are two options in this
case: first, the date by which the penalisation cost applies can be
moved earlier than the end of the weather forecast window; or
second, an additional ’artificial’ penalty can be added to account for
the damage.
4. Case study
The methods described in section 3.4 were applied, to create a
user-friendly software tool designed to fit in the daily maintenance
scheduling process. The software is implemented in C#, coupled to
ECN's offshore wind farm simulation engine (also in C#) and da-
tabases (MongoDB collections) to manage the inputs and outputs.
The object oriented time-domain simulation engine used for the
case study complies with the requirements in section 3.5.1. It de-
fines and manages ports, turbines, vessels and technicians as ob-
jects, which have locations and can move and contain each other as
appropriate. Failures cause turbines not to produce power, other-
wise their energy output is calculated according to the power curve
8 C. Stock-Williams, S.K. Swamy / Renewable Energy xxx (2018) 1e11
(wake losses are not considered). A time series of wind farm states
is produced, based on the Transfer Plan actions required (such as
orders to transit, transfer, isolate or repair a turbine) and the
weather conditions encountered. In this study, a significant wave
height limit of 1.5 m was used for vessel operability and Service
Order operations were not restricted by weather.
The tool was set up for Princess Amalia Wind Park in The
Netherlands (see Fig. 7a) using data provided by Eneco, covering
the period of April 1 to August 31 (153 days). Princess Amalia uses
only one Crew Transfer Vessel to conduct day-to-day maintenance,
and large repairs were excluded from this study. The farm has been
in operation since 2008, maintained under contract by the wind
turbine manufacturer.
To make a distinction between Transfer Plans actually used and
those generated by ECN's tool, we refer to the former as “historic
Transfer Plans” and to the latter as “optimum Transfer Plans”. The
optimisation objective is to minimise energy loss, since neither
costs nor energy prices were available. The evaluation is deter-
ministic, i.e. only one simulation is run to evaluate each Transfer
Plan, based on the weather forecast provided.
4.1. Results for a single day
The day shown in Fig. 7b is now used to examine how the
optimiser works. On this particular date, there are two corrective
and seven preventative service orders. The entire weather forecast
Fig. 7. Princess Amalia Wind Park. (a) Location in the North Sea of wind farm and O&M port; (b) turbine layout and status (number of preventative P and corrective C Service Orders
open per turbine) on an example day.
Please cite this article in press as: C. Stock-Williams, S.K. Swamy, Automated daily maintenance planning for offshore wind farms, Renewable
Energy (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2018.08.112
of nine days, shown in Fig. 8, is within the workability limits of the
vessel. However, the wind speed in the first day is much higher
than that predicted for the next six days.
The historic Transfer Plan assigns two technicians (out of the 12
available) to repair one of the two failed turbines. The optimum
Transfer Plan, however, chooses to schedule maintenance tasks for
both the failed turbines, using five technicians. As a result, both
turbines are returned to operation during the first day.
The performance of Transfer Plans is shown in Fig. 9. The energy
loss in the first day is, as expected, lower when both turbines are
replaced. The benefit of the optimum Transfer Plan reduces slightly
from 2.6 MWh to 2.5 MWh when the actual weather is considered.
This translates into V445 in additional income, based on the V175/
MWh which the wind farm received.
The optimiser automatically chose not to use more technicians,
or to perform any preventative tasks, because less energy is lost
when turning off turbines for maintenance in the remaining days of
the weather forecast period. Indeed, completing the remaining
preventative tasks is estimated to cost only 0.2 MWh under the
forecast weather.
In reality, the wind speed increased overnight. This is reflected
by an additional 5.6 MWh in energy loss incurred by the failed
turbine under the historic Transfer Plan, before it can be repaired on
the second day. Further, the unexpected storm on the final two days
of the weather forecast period prevents work. Completing the
preventative maintenance tasks is then estimated to cost 2.3 MWh.
 C. Stock-Williams, S.K. Swamy / Renewable Energy xxx (2018) 1e11 9

Fig. 8. Weather forecast and actual weather for an example scheduling period. (a) wind speed; (b) wave height.

While these differences do not result in a change to the choice of
optimum Transfer Plan in this instance, they show the potential
benefit of evaluating the Transfer Plans stochastically.
4.2. Continuous optimisation
The historic valuation method developed in sections 3.4 and 3.5
is now applied.
Each day, the energy lost under the historic Transfer Plans and
the energy lost under the wind farm as it evolves with the optimum
Transfer Plans is calculated. The differences are shown in Fig. 10.
As expected, the optimiser is able to balance effectively the goals
of doing more work earlier when energy production is low, versus
doing more work later when energy production is high. Over the 6
months, 1723 MWh is saved, generating an additional 302 kV in
income. This corresponds to an increase of 1.1% in energy output.
Over time, the magnitude of the benefit increases. This is
because the state of the wind farm diverges further from the initial
state over time. By comparison, a similar study which did not put
into practice the optimised Transfer Plans (but instead simply
applied the optimiser to the historical states of the wind farm each
day) improved income only by around 60 kV. Another explanatory
factor is an influx towards the end of the historical period of a
number of corrective maintenance actions, which require a large
number of man-hours to repair. The optimiser is able to reduce the
significant impact of these non-operational turbines on farm in-
come, due both to its superior decision-making ability and the state
of the wind farm which it has developed over the previous months.
The optimiser can be seen to make efforts to reduce the Service
Order backlog caused by fluctuations in the generation rate of new
Service Orders. However, implementing one further refinement -
allowing technician teams to work on more than one Service Order,
as described in Section 3.4.2 - would improve its ability to deal
simultaneously with large corrective Service Orders and the
backlog of preventative Service Orders.
Finally, it is worth noting that there are some practical diffi-
culties in matching up the Transfer Plans with the work actually
performed on the wind farm. The amount of work performed is
sometimes higher than expected from the simulations, partly
because the ordering of the turbine visits is often changed. The
decision was taken to ensure consistency of the amount of time
required to complete each Service Order, and use the evaluations of
the historic Transfer Plans to estimate the energy loss. It is possible
that this adjustment, whether caused by the simulator's imperfect

Please cite this article in press as: C. Stock-Williams, S.K. Swamy, Automated daily maintenance planning for offshore wind farms, Renewable
Energy (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2018.08.112
10 C. Stock-Williams, S.K. Swamy / Renewable Energy xxx (2018) 1e11

a optimised wind farm from the historic wind farm. However, it is not
fully clear in which direction such inaccuracies would bias the re-
sults. For example, in some cases examined, less preventative work
was performed than recorded, meaning that higher energy pro-
duction is calculated.

5. Conclusions and further work

5.1. Conclusions

The potential benefits of automated daily maintenance planning

b chosen to evolve with time.
Fig. 9. Evaluation of historic and optimum Transfer Plans for an example day. (a) using
the weather forecast, used to choose the optimum Transfer Plan; (b) using the actual
weather, used to value the improvement generated by automated planning.
for offshore wind farms have here, for the first time, been
demonstrated. Since daily decision support tools must balance the
short- and long-term effects of their decisions, the true benefits
cannot be demonstrated by looking at individual example days.
Instead, the robust valuation methodology described in section 2
must be applied when looking at historical wind farm data. This
methodology ensures a situation of identical knowledge at each
scheduling time; while allowing the impacts of each Transfer Plan
A review of the literature on this subject has shown that
insufficient attention has been paid to the use of metaheuristics
coupled to sophisticated offshore wind farm simulations. This
approach allows much simpler incorporation of realistic constraints
and evaluation of outcomes. A novel approach to optimising daily
Transfer Plans has therefore been developed, as described in sec-
tion 3.
This optimiser was applied to the Princess Amalia Wind Park in
section 4, over a 5 month period, following the valuation meth-
odology. The results show potential for significant additional yield
(þ1.1%) to be generated. This was achieved by optimising only
minor maintenance operations and, since the wind farm is rela-
tively small and has been operated by an experienced scheduling
team, it is clear that more recent wind farms could experience even
greater payback. However, ideally this valuation methodology
should be run for one year to evaluate the behaviour in different
times of year and weather conditions.
5.2. Route to impact

There is plenty of scope for further validation through case

representation of the real world or by real-world reporting inac- studies and insight brought through daily use by Schedulers. In
curacies, has resulted in additional cumulative divergence of the particular, demonstration on a newer wind farm, which uses more

Fig. 10. Cumulative change in income from the Princess Amalia Wind Park when daily maintenance is planned automatically.

Please cite this article in press as: C. Stock-Williams, S.K. Swamy, Automated daily maintenance planning for offshore wind farms, Renewable
Energy (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2018.08.112
 C. Stock-Williams, S.K. Swamy / Renewable Energy xxx (2018) 1e11
vessels and where the amount of time required to perform a task is
not well-known, will test the assumptions as well as potentially
deliver higher payback.
Optimisation for net income will also result in a different bal-
ance of priorities to minimising energy loss, and is likely to provide
Transfer Plans which are equally valuable to farms at different
stages of their lifetime and with different subsidy levels.
Robust optimisation, where uncertainties are considered in the
evaluation, is possible without much alteration to the approach
described in section 3.4. Probability distributions over the sto-
chastic variables (error on the weather forecast, time required to
complete each Service Order) should be defined and then sampled
in order to generate a large number of independent evaluations for
each Transfer Plan proposed by the optimiser. A statistic calculated
from the distribution of objective values observed from these
simulations (chosen according to the business objective; the me-
dian or another percentile is suggested) is then passed back to the
optimiser. It is important to fix the same random seed for all
evaluations, so that the solution surface remains deterministic for
the optimiser.
The work presented here also aims to encourage further appli-
cations of Artificial Intelligence to wind farm Operations & Main-
tenance. A major extension to the concept would take the future
degradation of the components into account (for instance in the
manner suggested by Welte et al. [22]). Then short-term and long-
term decision making could be integrated into a single wind farm
management and optimisation tool.
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due first to RVO/TKI Wind op Zee (DAISY4Offshore,
project number TEW0214006) and the European Space Agency
(ISSWIND) for the funding to conduct this research.
Second, to Eneco for providing the data from Princess Amalia
Wind Park, and in particular to Tom Obdam for his support in un-
derstanding both the data and the industry's needs for this
solution.
Finally to Magnus Stålhane of NTNU, Kester Gunn of E.ON, the
two anonymous reviewers, and Camiel Egbers, Ashish Dewan, Peter
Eecen, Novita Saraswati and Rens Savenije from ECN part of TNO for
their valuable support and advice.
References
[1] O. Abdoun, J. Abouchabaka, A comparative study of adaptive crossover oper-
ators for genetic algorithms to resolve the traveling salesman problem, Int. J.
Comput. Appl. 31 (2011) 49e57.
Please cite this article in press as: C. Stock-Williams, S.K. Swamy, Automated daily maintenance planning for offshore wind farms, Renewable
Energy (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2018.08.112
View publication stats
11
[2] F.F. Boctor, G. Laporte, J. Renaud, Heuristics for the traveling purchaser
problem, Comput. Oper. Res. 30 (2003) 491e504.
[3] L. Dai, M. Stålhane, I.B. Utne, Routing and scheduling of maintenance fleet for
offshore wind farms, Wind Eng. 39 (1) (2015) 15e30.
[4] G. Dantzig, R. Fulkerson, S. Johnson, Solution of a large-scale travelling-
salesman problem, J. Oper. Res. Soc. Am. (1954) 393e410.
[5] R. Dawid, D. McMillan, M. Revie, Development of an O&M tool for short term
decision making applied to offshore wind farms, in: Wind Europe, WindEu-
rope, Hamburg, Germany, 2016.
[6] DONG Energy, DONG Energy Awarded Three German Offshore Wind Projects,
04, 2017. URL, http://www.dongenergy.com/en/media/newsroom/company-
announcements-details?omxid¼1557851.
[7] I. Fonseca, J.T. Farinha, F.M. Barbosa, Maintenance planning in wind farms
with allocation of teams using genetic algorithms, IEEE Latin Am. Transact. 12
(6) (2014) 1062e1070.
[8] D. Goldberg, Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization & Machine Learning,
Addison-Wesley, 1989.
[9] M. Hofmann, A review of decision support models for offshore wind farms
with an emphasis on operation and maintenance strategies, Wind Eng. 35 (1)
(2011) 1e16.
[10] C.A. Irawan, D. Ouelhadj, D. Jones, M. Stålhane, I.B. Sperstad, Optimisation of
maintenance routing and scheduling for offshore wind farms, Eur. J. Oper. Res.
256 (2017) 76e89.

cs, G. Erdo €s, Z.J. Viharos, L. Monostori, A System for the Detailed
[11] A. Kova
Scheduling of Wind Farm Maintenance, CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Tech-
nology, 2011.
[12] P. Larran~ aga, C. Kuijpers, R. Murga, I. Inza, S. Dizdarevic, Genetic algorithms for
the travelling salesman problem: a review of representations and operators,
Artif. Intell. Rev. 13 (1999) 129e170.
[13] C.-Y. Lee, E. Antonsson, Variable length genomes for evolutionary algorithms,
in: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference. Las
Vegas, USA, 2000.
[14] J. Magalha ~es-Mendes, A comparative study of crossover operators for genetic
algorithms to solve the job shop scheduling problem, WSEAS Trans. Comput.
12 (4) (2013) 164e173.
[15] Microsoft Patterns & Practices Team, Microsoft Application Architecture
Guide, second ed., Microsoft Press, 2009.
[16] L. Perron, Planning and scheduling teams of skilled workers, J. Intell. Manuf.
21 (2010) 155e164.
[17] N.T. Raknes, K. Ødeskaug, M. Stålhane, L.M. Hvattum, Scheduling of mainte-
nance tasks and routing of a joint vessel fleet for multiple offshore wind
farms, J. Mar. Sci. Eng. 5 (11) (2017).
[18] G. Smart, A. Smith, E. Warner, I.B. Sperstad, B. Prinsen, R. Lacal-Ara
ntegui, IEA
Task 36: Offshore Wind Farm Baseline Documentation, Tech. Rep. NREL/TP-
6A20-66262, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, 2016.
[19] M. Stålhane, L.M. Hvattuma, V. Skåra, Optimization of routing and scheduling
of vessels to perform maintenance at offshore wind farms, Energy Proc. 80
(2015) 92e99.
[20] H. Tan, W. Lv, L. Jin, Z. Liu, J. Feng, Modeling and solution of offshore wind
farm maintenance scheduling, in: 2nd International Conference on Sustain-
able Energy and Environmental Engineering, 2016.
[21] M.J. Varnamkhasti, L.S. Lee, M.R. Bakar, W.J. Leong, A genetic algorithm with
fuzzy crossover operator and probability, Adv. Oper. Res. 2012 (2012),
956498.
[22] T.M. Welte, I.B. Sperstad, E.H. Sørum, M.L. Kolstad, Integration of degradation
processes in a strategic offshore wind farm O&M simulation model, Energies
10 (2017) 925.
[23] Z. Zhang, Scheduling and routing optimization of maintenance fleet for
offshore wind farms using Duo-ACO, Adv. Mater. Res. 1039 (2014) 294e301.