A hybrid multi-agent metaheuristic for the offshore wind farm cable routing problem

A crucial task concerning offshore wind farm designs is connecting previously placed turbines to a substation, such that the total cable cost is minimal. An NP-hard optimization problem named Wind Farm Cable Routing Problem ( WFCRP ) models this task. Previous studies have proposed Mixed Integer Linear Programming formulations ( MILP ) and metaheuristics for the WFCRP. . However, they faced difficulties in solving instances with many turbines. Hybridization is a widely-explored approach that has produced better solutions as it combines the best features of individual algorithms. This paper proposes a hybrid algorithm for the WFCRP that combines four state-of-the-art metaheuristics and a MILP formulation. The hybridization technique uses multi- agent and Particle Swarm Optimization concepts, where particles are cooperative agents that work together to find high-quality solutions. Experimental results on instances with up to 120 turbines show that the proposed hybrid algorithm outperforms the best algorithm from the WFCRP literature.