The use of real option in condition-based maintenance scheduling for wind turbines with production and deterioration uncertainties

Preventive maintenance planning is an important problem for the handling of energy production systems with high down time costs. Throughout the last decade different maintenance strategies have been developed and optimized in order to minimize operational and maintenance costs whilst conserving and improving the system reliability and productivity. Preventive maintenance strategies are usually based on the monitoring and the prediction of the system behavior and its deterioration process. However, some industrial systems may be operating under a dynamic environment and/or variable working conditions. In this case both the deterioration and the production processes may not be deterministic and incorporate different types of uncertainties. In this paper, we consider the case of a preventive maintenance strategy for a production system subject to uncertainty. For this system, a decision-making procedure for condition-based maintenance planning is proposed. In order to consider uncertainty in production and deterioration processes, these latter are modeled by non-monotonic stochastic processes. The modeling of deterioration processes by means of jump-diffusion stochastic processes has been proposed in our previous work. In this paper, a decision-making approach for preventive maintenance strategies is proposed. Knowing the remaining useful life of a system, a simulation-based real options analysis is used in order to determine the best date to maintain. Considering a case study of a wind turbine with PHM structure, the decision-making approach is described and tested through an empirical example. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.