Solving a wind turbine maintenance scheduling problem

Driven by climate change mitigation efforts, wind energy has significantly increased in recent years. In this context, it is essential to make its exploitation costeffective. Maintenance of wind turbines therefore playsan essential role reducing breakdowns and ensuring high productivity levels. In this paper we discuss a challenging maintenance scheduling problem rising in wind farms. While the research in the field primarily focuses on condition-based maintenance strategies, we aim to address the problem on a short-term horizon considering fine-grained resource management. The objective is to find a maintenance plan that maximizes the production of the turbines while taking into account wind predictions, multiple task execution modes, and task-technician assignment constraints. To solve this problem, we propose a constraint programmingbased large neighborhood search approach. We also propose two integer linear programming formulations that we solve using a commercial solver. We report results on randomly generated instances built with input from wind forecasting and maintenance scheduling software companies.