After-sales services optimisation through dynamic opportunistic maintenance: a wind energy case study

Abstract

After-sales maintenance services can be a very profitable source of incomes for original equipment manufacturers (OEM) due to the increasing interest of assets' users on performance-based contracts. However, when it concerns the product value-adding process, OEM have traditionally been more focused on improving their production processes, rather than on complementing their products by offering after-sales services; consequently leading to difficulties in offering them efficiently. Furthermore, both due to the high uncertainty of the assets' behaviour and the inherent challenges of managing the maintenance process (e.g. maintenance strategy to be followed or resources to be deployed), it is complex to make business out of the provision of after-sales services. With the aim of helping the business and maintenance decision makers at this point, this paper proposes a framework for optimising the incomes of after-sales maintenance services through: 1) implementing advanced multi-objective opportunistic maintenance strategies that sistematically consider the assets' operational context in order to perform preventive maintenance during most favourable conditions, 2) considering the specific OEMs' and users' needs, and 3) assessing both internal and external uncertainties that might condition the after-sales services' success. The developed case study for the wind energy sector demonstrates the suitability of the presented framework for optimising the after-sales services.

Asset Management Framework and Tools for Facing Challenges in the Adoption of Product-Service Systems

“…7. Uncertainty impact in PSS offer [69] In order to facilitate such risk-based decision process, the strategic decision support function has been provided with a cost-risk-benefit mechanism (M4). This mechanism iteratively evaluates the optimised PSS solutions (O3) under different uncertainty sources' influence (I4), which will let analyse the variability of the outcome of the Optimised PSS; thus enabling to design a feasible PSS offer (O4) with its associated maintenance strategy (O6), that meets stakeholders' interests at an admissible risk adoption (see Figure 7).…”

“…These statistical analyses will provide manufacturers with confidence intervals [43], [71], letting them define specific rules that will restrain adopted risks, e.g. a maximum variability on an specific objective Z (σ 2 (z) < V ariability T hreshold) or a minimum value of such objective with a probability (P [Z > z s ] ≥ P robability T hreshold) [68] (see authors' paper [69] for further details on this mechanism implementation and application).…”

“…Framework ICOMs I Fleet of 70 wind turbines, 4 systems (gearbox, blades, pitch and yaw system) with 2 failure modes each. Authors' related work [69], [73] PSS terms are often complex to define and they might entail a conflict of interest between manufacturers and customers, which usually brings customers' mistrust and avoids the actual PSS implementation (see BA1 and BA3). In this context, the customized and transparent design of the PSSs' terms by manufacturers and customers plays a key role on the final PSS implementation and success.…”

Joint optimization of reliability design and spares inventory for a use-oriented product-service system based on the electric vehicle charging station

“…Previous literatures usually concentrated on only one aspect. 21 Such as Moreno et al, 22 Noorossanna and Sabri-Laghaie (2015), 23 Erguido et al, 24 Qiu et al 25 and Zhao et al 26 all considered the maintenance modeling problems for a complex industrial system to improve the system reliability or cost/ benefit. Abdossaber et al 27 focused on improving the reliability problem through the mixed redundancy strategy.…”

An improved opportunistic group replacement maintenance strategy for wind turbines

“…A multi‐objective opportunistic maintenance strategy was implemented to optimize the income of after‐sales in Ref. [18]. The economic dependence and structural dependence were simultaneously considered in Ref.…”