As the emergence of large-scale offshore wind farms (WFs), how to reduce the high cost of them has become a critical problem. One way is to decrease the maintenance cost, another way is to capture more wind energy. Herein, an optimised WF active power dispatch (APD) strategy is proposed to make WF capture the maximum wind energy while balancing the fatigue distribution of WF, which is closely related to the WF maintenance frequency. In addition, two traditional strategies are introduced as comparisons of the proposed strategy. And the result of strategy A is used as a benchmark for comparison. This paper takes fatigue coefficient to evaluate the fatigue load suffered by wind turbines (WT). Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is adopted to solve this problem. Simulations are conducted based on a regular shaped WF with 25 WTs and an irregular shaped WF with 80 WTs. The results of case studies prove the superiority of the strategy formulated herein. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.