An autonomous decision-making agent for offshore wind turbine blades under leading edge erosion

The increasing pressure of offshore wind developments is leading to projects being located in areas with more difficult access and greater weather barriers. As these constraints increase, O&M costs also grow in importance. Therefore, the current scenario requires a careful planning to avoid unnecessary costly maintenance decisions or unexpected failures. To overcome the problem of increasing O&M costs and difficult access, this manuscript presents an autonomous decision-making Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent to improve O&M planning for the Leading Edge Erosion (LEE) problem. The method developed in this work makes use of a linear degradation model to account for the damage progression dynamics and site-specific weather models. The RL-based agent proposed in this manuscript is able to reduce expected O&M costs in the range of 12%-21% when compared with condition-based policies.