  The offshore wind energy is increasingly becoming an attractive source of
energy due to having lower environmental impact. Effective operation and
maintenance that ensures the maximum availability of the energy generation
process using offshore facilities and minimal production cost are two key
factors to improve the competitiveness of this energy source over other
traditional sources of energy. Condition monitoring systems are widely used for
health management of offshore wind farms to have improved operation and
maintenance. Reliability of the wind farms are increasingly being evaluated to
aid in the maintenance process and thereby to improve the availability of the
farms. However, much of the reliability analysis is performed offline based on
statistical data. In this article, we propose a drone-assisted monitoring based
method for online reliability evaluation of wind turbines. A blade system of a
wind turbine is used as an illustrative example to demonstrate the proposed
approach.
