Seminar Series in Management Science and Quantitative Economics

Diego Ruiz-Hernández and Fausto García-Márques
CUNEF, Universidad de Castilla – La Mancha Ingenuim Research Group

A Novel Scheduling Maintenance Management Method for Wind Farms

Wednesday 25th of November, 2011, from 1330 to 1500
Colegio Universitario de Estudios Financieros
Serrano Anguita 8, Madrid, 28004
Sala de Seminarios (Aula 12)

The EU has adopted a strong and decisive policy for the development of renewable energy, especially wind power. The high cost of the machinery and infrastructure, combined with the difficulty of access by human resources to them, requires the use a complex maintenance systems to achieve a high availability, reliability, maintainability and safety of the wind farms. In earlier work, one of the authors established the indexability of a class of restless bandits designed to model machine maintenance problems in which maintenance interventions have to be scheduled to mitigate escalating costs as machines deteriorate, and to reduce the chances of a machine breakdown.

In this work the authors analyse the maintenance scheduling problem for wind farms, where the wind turbines are modelled as restless bandits. The authors further develop the findings in their earlier work by offering new families of examples for which explicit formulae for the Whittle index can be derived. Moreover, the Whittle index heuristics is deployed to a collection of case studies in wind farms, with the aim of minimising the operation and maintenance costs, as well as to reduce the chances (and likely very large costs) of a breakdown. Results of numerical tests evidence a very strong performance of the corresponding index heuristic.

Para confirmar asistencia y para cualquier asunto relacionado con el Seminario contactar con Prof. Dídac Ruiz-Hernández
(d.ruiz@cunef.du)

Diego Ruiz-Hernández is PhD in Operational Research from Universitat Pompeu Farba in Barcelona. He is currently associate professor of Financial Mathematics and Business Statistics at CUNEF. His research fields are dynamic allocation models, heuristic solutions for stochastic decision problems and network and discrete location models. Diego is currently member of the Sociedad Española de Estadística e Investigación Operativa, the Operational Research Society (UK) and the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (USA).