
 
operator is to opt for the maintenance strategy that 
would enable a better profitability of the windfarm. 
Our method is focused on this priority. Indeed, the 
vision  of  financial  profitability,  reinforces  the 
technical  vision  of  maintenance  while  usually 
profitability  is  often  separated  from  the  financial 
sector. Availability is no longer the only criterion of 
maintenance  analysis  because  the  wind  farm’s 
profitability accentuates this analysis. 
Our  approach  uses  a  model  based  on  MAS 
theory  to  realize  wind  farm  profitability  scenarios 
based on available budget forecasts and information 
on  breakdowns  that  would  occur.  The  main 
objective is to evaluate different scenarios and their 
profitability providing financial indicators for one or 
many failures  list  to  choose  the  scenario  that  suits 
the operator's requirements. 
1.1  The Problem of Maintenance in 
Wind Energy Sector 
There are several types of maintenance that are used 
in wind energy sector: 
Preventive  maintenance:  it  aims  to  reduce  the 
breakdowns by anticipating them. The interventions 
are carried out after a well-defined duration (annual, 
semi-annual  etc…)  or  after  a  signal  appearance 
following  the  failure  or  the  going  beyond  a 
threshold. This type of maintenance aims to reduce 
the possible risk of breakdown. It corresponds to a 
logic  of  the  breakdowns  prevention  and 
maximization of the availability. Ideally for a wind 
farm, this type of maintenance is carried out during 
the periods of low wind to ensure availability during 
the periods of strong winds.  
Curative  maintenance:  used  in  a  single  way, 
curative  maintenance  certainly  reduced  well  the 
maintenance  costs,  but  it  can  quickly  exceed  the 
forecasts and causes important disadvantages related 
to  the  production.  As  the  wind  farm  ages,  the 
number  of  corrective  increases  and  generates 
indirect costs which it is difficult to estimate before 
the breakdowns. 
Corrective  maintenance:  it’s  a  type  of 
maintenance made after  a diagnosis of  breakdown. 
Its  goal  is  to  set  back  an  element  in  operating 
condition  (Hajej  and  Rezg,  2012).  It’s  a  strategy 
which  results  in  an  unquestionable  advantage 
relating  to  the  maximum  use  of  the  wind  turbine’s 
components;  in  fact,  the  equipment  is  replaced  or 
repaired  only  in  the  event  of  breakdown.  It’s  also 
called  the  “breakdown”  strategy.  In  the  case  of  a 
wind turbine, the failures often occur during period 
of strong wind. However, it is in this period that the 
wind  turbine  must  be  available  to  the  production. 
The  wind  turbine’s  stop  throughout  corrective 
maintenance thus involves a consequent production 
loss.  The  single  advantage  of  a  corrective 
maintenance is  that  it  makes it  possible  to  use  the 
equipment until exhaustion. 
Hybrid maintenance: it is the  most current type 
of  maintenance.  It  combines  the  two  types  of 
maintenance:  preventive  and  corrective.  It  consists 
in  anticipating  some  breakdowns  by  the  means  of 
preventive  interventions  and  being  reactive  for  the 
corrective  O&M  operations  when  the  breakdowns 
occur. 
Several  maintenance  tools  were  developed  by 
research  laboratories  and  companies.  Each  one  of 
these  tools  adopts  an  angle  of  analysis  of 
maintenance. It can be oriented to some maintenance 
fields like spares management or to the whole O&M 
field  including:  spares  management,  human 
resources, installation etc…). For example: 
1.  SINBAD (Guillon, 2015): is a tool which main 
objective  is  to  predict  the  behaviour  of  a  wind 
turbine  at  any  moment.  This  project  was  born 
from  a  recommendation  of  a  Franco-British 
partnership  dedicated  to  the  offshore  oil  rig  to 
create a digital tool allowing the visualization of 
the  tree  structure  of  wind  turbines  offshore  oil 
rigs. 
2.  The  OMCE  (Operation  and  Maintenance  Cost 
Estimator) (Rademakers et al., 2009): it is one of 
the  most  complete  models  of  simulation, 
marketed  since  2004.  The  project  was  initiated 
by  a  consortium  including  Vestas,  Shell  Wind 
Energy, DTU and ECN (Energy Research of the 
Netherlands).  It  combines  three  strategies  of 
maintenance:  corrective,  preventive  and 
predictive  to  predict  the  annual  cost  of  the 
maintenance  actions  of  wind  farms.  (Onshore 
and Offshores) (van de  Pieterman et  al., 2011). 
As  inputs,  the  tool  records  the  components 
reliabilities,  maintainer  information  and  the 
operation to provide maintenance costs. 
From the maintenance operator’s point of view,  the 
problems  consist  in  finding  the  “optimal”  cost  of 
maintenance  that  represents  balance  between  an 
expected production of the wind farm and a budget 
associated  with  a  series  of  breakdowns  planned 
during the period. To optimize maintenance, we thus 
must  optimize  the  budget  of  maintenance 
(subcontracts and spares) on the wind farms because 
it  represents  the  most  important  owner’s  growth 
drivers. 
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