Proceedings of the

The 33rd European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2023)
3 – 8 September 2023, Southampton, UK

Mathematical Formulation of Markov Decision Process to Address Maintenance Policy in Photovoltaic Farms

Eduardo Tadeu Bacalhau1,a, Flávia Barbosa2,c, Luciana Casacio1,b, Felipe Yamada2,d and Luís Guimarães2,e

1Pontal do Parana Campus, Center of Marine Studies, Federal University of Parana, Brazil.

2INESC TEC, Faculdade de Engenharia, Universidade do Porto, Portugal.

ABSTRACT

In order to face the challenges incurred by climate change, the industry has been striving to improve the overall performance of photovoltaic (PV) systems. Unsolved challenges remain concerning reliability, numerous unforeseen outages, and high operation and maintenance (O&M) costs. In this context, this work increases the operational performance of PV plants by improving current methodologies for O&M in PV systems. We develop a maintenance approach based in a Markov decision process model to analyze the data from PV power plants, prioritize actions, advise asset replacement, and schedule preventive maintenance tasks based on past experiences and the PV system condition. The results allow economic improvement through downtime reduction and early detection of system under performance.

Keywords: Maintenance policy, Markov decision process, Photovoltaic farms, Reliability, Operation and maintenance cost, Optimisation.


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