Optimization of Wind Farm Layout: A Refinement Method by Random Search

Wind farm layout optimization is to find the optimal positions of wind turbines inside a wind farm, so as to maximize and/or minimize a single objective or multiple objectives, while satisfying certain constraints. Most of the works in the literature divide the wind farm into cells in which turbines can be placed, hence, simplifying the problem from with continuous variables to with discrete variables. In this paper, a refinement method, based on continuous formulation, by using random search is proposed to improve the optimization results based on discrete formulations. Two sets of optimization results of a widely studied test case are refined using the proposed method. One set of the results is from a published work using GA based on discrete formulation, the other set is the improved results using authors’ own GA code. Steady improvements are obtained for both sets of results.