A lifecycle approach to performance based service optimization for dynamic wind turbine fleets

Under the performance based logistics (PBL) scheme, this paper proposes a quantitative method to minimize wind turbine life cycle cost across the design, manufacturing, and maintenance service. To meet the PBL agreement, the turbine manufacturer is responsible for attaining the equipment availability goal by providing spare parts and repair services against field failures. Our study focuses on the situation where the size of the wind turbine fleet increases over time, resulting in a time-varying demand stream of spare parts. The Poisson process is used to model aggregate fleet failures. We also adopt emergency repair if a ready-for-use spare part is not available in the base stock. Our study demonstrates how the life cycle cost of wind turbines can be significantly reduced if reliability can be designed into early product stage.