Wind farm maintenance planned around the weather
Which crew services which turbine when — inside the weather windows, so the wind farm loses as little energy as possible?
Drag to rotate, scroll or pinch to zoom. The schedule below plays the plan; hover a bar for details. Plan from OptaZEN’s own local search (late acceptance) on the same model; in a project we build it with Timefold.
The planning question
A real wind farm in the Westerwald with 28 turbines. Over five days, a weather front passes. Three service crews and one mobile crane carry out annual services, blade inspections, oil changes, two main-bearing exchanges and urgent fault repairs. Every stop costs energy: maintenance on calm hours loses little, a faulty turbine loses production until it is repaired, and work at height is only allowed below a wind limit.
How we plan it
The plan weighs each hour of work against the energy the turbine would produce in that hour — which is why calm Monday is used for services and the storm day stays free.
What the plan shows
| KPI | Optimized plan | Comparison: fixed round by turbine number |
|---|---|---|
| lost energy | 58.2 MWh −68.9 | 127.1 MWh |
| fault downtime | 60 h −170 | 230 h |
| jobs not planned | 0 −4 | 4 |
| driving | 1.9 h +0.6 | 1.3 h |
Decisions
- crew and start of every job
- order of the jobs per crew
- slot of the mobile crane for the large exchanges
Constraints
- work at height only below 12 m/s (rope access 9 m/s, crane lifts 8 m/s)
- crews work 07:00–17:00 and drive from the service base
- one mobile crane, on site from Wednesday
- a faulty turbine stays stopped until it is repaired
Objective
little lost energy, faults repaired fast, few driving hours
Questions
Where does the wind forecast come from?
From a weather service at hub height; the plan is updated when the forecast changes.
Is this a Timefold model?
This demo uses OptaZEN’s own local search on the same model; in a project we build it with Timefold (similar to the maintenance-scheduling quickstart).
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