Deep reinforcement learning for optimizing operation and maintenance of energy systems equipped with phm capabilities

The Life Cycle Cost (LCC) of energy systems including Renewable Energy Sources (RES) strongly depends on the Operation and Maintenance (O&M) costs. Nowadays, many components of these energy systems are equipped with Prognostics & Health Management (PHM) capabilities, for estimating their current and future health states. This information is intended to be used for the optimization of O&M. It is an ambitious and challenging objective as the uncertain information brought by PHM must be combined with other factors influencing O&M, such as the limited availability of maintenance crews, the variability of energy demand and production, the long-time horizons of energy systems. In this work, we formalize the O&M optimization of RES-based energy systems equipped with PHM as a sequential decision problem over a long-time horizon and we solve it by Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). The proposed methodology is applied to a small wind farm. Strengths and weaknesses are analyzed by means of a comparison with state-of-the-art O&M policies.