Maintenance scheduling and vessel routing for offshore wind farms with multiple ports considering day-ahead wind-wave predictions

Abstract

Wind power continues to be the fastest-growing source of renewable energy, with offshore wind development playing a crucial role globally. However, one significant challenge is the inadequate capacity of offshore wind ports, which may lead to delays in installation and maintenance plans. Existing operations and maintenance (OAM) frameworks generally overlook constraints imposed by limited port and vessel availability, focusing primarily on the effects of unrestricted resources on maintenance schedules. To address this issue, this article proposes a novel resource-centered maintenance strategy (RCMS) that incorporates the impact of various resource conditions on opportunistic maintenance scheduling and multi-type vessel routing. Unlike traditional health-centered maintenance strategies, the RCMS quantifies the opportunities emerging from dynamic wind speeds. By leveraging day-ahead predictions of wind speeds and wave heights, the port activation and the collaborative dispatching of multi-type vessels from different ports are optimized, ensuring timely maintenance execution while achieving flexible resource allocation. Accordingly, both the positive and negative impacts of resources (weather conditions, service vessels, and OAM ports) are considered. Experimental results show that for offshore wind farm clusters with multiple ports, the RCMS can reduce overall transportation costs by 74.6 %, 0.9 %, and 6.1 % compared to the easy-to-implement and two fixed port strategies.