Agent-oriented development of hybrid wind turbine monitoring systems

Abstract

Structural health monitoring is a growing field of research and of paramount practical relevance. Backed by the recent advances in engineering technologies and computing methods, structural health monitoring has the potential to reliably identify damages and deteriorations of structures, at an early stage, resulting in significantly reduced repair and maintenance costs. Considering the emerging field of wind turbine monitoring, this paper presents an innovative hybrid (i.e. software-hardware) monitoring system based on multi-agent technology. Since this technology represents a novel approach towards developing fully decentralized and autonomous monitoring systems, adequate agent-oriented development strategies for structural health monitoring have not yet been proposed. Thus, a suitable development methodology for agent-based monitoring systems is introduced in this paper, which is exemplified by means of a prototype of a wind turbine monitoring system (WTMS). Focusing mainly on the software part of the WTMS prototype, various re-usable system models being part of the methodology are to be illuminated in detail. To this respect, requirements analysis, design, implementation and application of the monitoring system will be demonstrated. Also, an evaluation of the already implemented prototype using actual field data obtained from a wind turbine in operation is carried out.