Balanced cable routing for offshore wind farms with obstacles

The cable routing problem is the task of designing theminimum-cost electrical network between the turbines of offshore wind farmswhile satisfying several constraints. It contributes to decreasing wind energycosts, favoring the green transition. This paper focuses on balanced cablerouting, studying both branched and radial network topology. First, we proposea visibility graph to route cables around obstacles and boundaries present inthe wind farm area. Next, we develop a novel Large Neighborhood Search (LNS)heuristic using neighborhoods of increasing complexity: swap, exchanging two turbines between root-branches; double swap, exchanging two pairs of turbines; cycle swap, moving turbines between root-branches; and re-partition, re-partitioning and re-routing two adjacentroot-branches. We also extend the LNS heuristic to the unbalanced branchedconfiguration to compare to existing literature. On average, it finds solutionsof the same quality using two orders of magnitude less run-time, improving thesolutions in five cases.