  The rapid increase in scale and sophistication of offshore wind (OSW) farms
poses a critical challenge related to the cost-effective operation and
management of wind energy assets. A defining characteristic of this challenge
is the economic trade-off between two concomitant processes: power production
(the primary driver of short-term revenues), and asset degradation (the main
determinant of long-term expenses). Traditionally, approaches to optimize
production and maintenance in wind farms have been conducted in isolation. In
this paper, we conjecture that a joint optimization of those two processes,
achieved by rigorously modeling their short- and long-term dependencies, can
unlock significant economic benefits for wind farm operators. In specific, we
propose a decision-theoretic framework, rooted in stochastic optimization,
which seeks a sensible balance of how wind loads are leveraged to harness
short-term electricity generation revenues, versus alleviated to hedge against
longer-term maintenance expenses. Extensive numerical experiments using
real-world data confirm the superior performance of our approach, in terms of
several operational performance metrics, relative to methods that tackle the
two problems in isolation.
