After-sales maintenance service strategies optimization. An offshore wind farm case study

After-sale maintenance services for machine manufacturers can be a very profitable source of incomes. Although historically machine manufacturers have mainly been focused on improving their production processes, in the last years many machine manufacturers have also included after-sale service processes into their business strategies. When defining after-sale services, one of the main difficulties is to identify, firstly, which maintenance requirements has each asset, secondly, which maintenance strategy (i.e. corrective-preventive-predictive mix) should be followed in each particular case, and thirdly which resources are needed to schedule and perform the maintenance tasks. With the purpose of supporting this decision making process concerning asset management strategies, in the proposed research it is developed an agent-based simulation tool that allows to identify the correct maintenance strategy. The experiments performed for this particular study allows identifying critical service parameters and resources vs. results (i.e. availability and benefits) trade off optimization for an offshore wind farm case study. (C) 2016, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.