An improved opportunistic group replacement maintenance strategy for wind turbines

In traditional opportunistic group replacement maintenance (OGRM) strategy for wind turbines, the reliability thresholds of different subassemblies are set the same and its two‐step optimization for maintenance cost is diseconomy. In this paper, an improved OGRM strategy for wind turbines is proposed. A uniform formulation on maintenance cost concerning different maintenance activities is presented. On the basis of this, an integrated objective function minimizing the maintenance cost is established, and the reliability thresholds of each subassembly of wind turbines are individually severed as the optimization variables of the objective function. The coordinate rotation method is utilized for solving this optimization problem. A maintenance case based on the proposed strategy from a wind farm in North China is implemented, which verifies its superior performance than the traditional opportunistic group maintenance strategy. An improved opportunistic group replacement maintenance (OGRM) strategy for wind turbines is proposed to solve the deficiencies of traditional OGRM, such as, same reliability thresholds for different subassemblies, diseconomy two‐step optimization for maintenance cost, etc A uniform formulation on maintenance cost concerning different maintenance activities is presented. An integral objective function minimizing the maintenance cost is established, and the reliability thresholds of each subassembly of wind turbines are individually severed as the optimization variables of the objective function.