Offshore Wind Farm Layout Optimization via Differential Evolution

The Wind Farm Layout Problem (WFLP) consists in the placement of eolic generators (either in a grid, or at any position) into a delimited terrain. Several factors are taken into account to solve the WFLP, which include produced energy, costs - environmental, installation, maintenance, etc-, average useful life of turbines, among other. Likewise, optimization techniques involve the use of one or more objective functions, considering traditional as well as evolutionary approaches. Differential Evolution (DE) is an algorithm proposed for global optimization, whose operators are both simple to program and to utilize, still providing good convergence properties. The original authors of DE suggested its first five variants, which are: best/1/bin, best/2/bin, current - to - best/1/bin, rand/1/bin, and rand/2/bin. In this article it is proposed the comparison of five DE variants when they are used to solve 25 different instances of the WFLP; experimental results show that DE/best/1/bin outperforms the remaining algorithms in terms of convergence velocity as well as in the quality of the obtained wind-farm.