Simulation of Health and Safety Aspects during the Maintenance of Offshore Wind Farms

摘要

Operations as well as health and safety aspects during the maintenance of off-shore wind farms are connected within a complex process that is highly dependent on environmental conditions and the chosen maintenance strategy. Health and safety restrictions must be carefully balanced with economic performance parameters and local environmental conditions. To explore this balance, we developed a simulation model for different operation and maintenance strategies that provides information about accessibility of wind turbines, technical availability of the wind farm, and the mean time to repair. The model represents the maintenance process using discrete events steered by stochastic environmental and process related input parameters. It is built upon the abundance on existing maintenance simulation models for off-shore wind farm and can therefore be considered as stable enough to explore the specific effects of health and safety modeling aspects. The model implements health and safety aspects using a rule-based decision system that defines certain thresholds beyond which maintenance processes will not be carried out. These thresholds are based on existing health and safety standards for off-shore windfarm maintenance routines. To illustrate the model, we implemented it for a fictional offshore wind farm. Initial simulation experiments show that the model allows to quickly understand the effects of different choices on several key performance indicators.