Proactive Mission Planning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Fleets Used in Offshore Wind Farm Maintenance

Abstract

This paper presents a declarative model of maintenance logistics for offshore wind farms. Its implementation in decision-making tools supporting wind turbine maintenance enables online prototyping of alternative scenarios and variants of wind turbine servicing, including weather-related operation vessel movement and routing of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) fleets carrying out maintenance on these wind turbines during monitoring or component-delivery missions. The possibility of implementing the model was verified via two case studies focusing, separately, on the issues of routing and scheduling of a UAV fleet used for the inspection of wind turbines and the distribution of ordered spare parts. The open structure of the model allows for its easy generalization, expanding the range of supported functions, including vessel fleet routing in an offshore wind farm, staff and competence planning of service teams, and supply chain management, enabling the planning of tool sets distributed to serviced wind turbines. Computer experiments conducted for various weather conditions confirm the competitiveness of the proposed approach.