Process Mining for Wind Turbine Maintenance Process Analysis: A Case Study

The maintenance of the entire life cycle of wind turbines is important for a wind power project. The main reason is that whether wind turbines can perform their best during the operation period is one of the key factors to measure the success or failure of a wind farm investment. However, with the increasing number of installed wind turbines, how to perform the maintenance in an efficient way will become a challenging problem. To lead better services, the first step is to analyze how the maintenance process or workflow really works in real-life scenarios. Process mining is such a technique which can perform process analysis over event logs recorded by information systems. Although various process mining case studies have been reported in current literature, there is no relevant study about the maintenance of wind turbines in the domain of energy systems. As an initial investigation, in this paper, we present a brief case study on applying process mining for wind turbine maintenance process analysis, based on several real event logs. Specifically, we have given the design of our study and reported the analysis results. We believe that the study will be of value to the community to understand the merits of how process mining technique can improve wind turbine maintenance processes in practice.