Optimizing Maintenance Planning for Marine Energy Generators

Maintenance plans for production assets must balance the cost of maintenance against failures/downtime penalties. For marine renewable energy (MRE) generators, this trade-of can be achieved by minimizing the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) which accounts for costs from setup, decommissioning, and operations and maintenance. Thus, the present paper details a novel optimization formulation to minimize LCOE for an MRE undergoing selective maintenance (SM) either offshore or onshore. A binary integer programming formulation is proposed with offshore maintenance likelihood captured via an exogenous parameter. Numerical experiments involving a single MRE system are tested to compare the LCOE model against classical formulations using minimum-cost and maximum-reliability objective functions. The results demonstrate the benefits of minimizing LCOE in comparison to other objective functions when balancing competing priorities and desiring more flexible/nuanced maintenance plans.