Robust design and optimization for autonomous PV-wind hybrid power systems

This study presents a robust design method for autonomous photovoltaic (PV)-wind hybrid power systems to obtain an optimum system configuration insensitive to design variable variations. This issue has been formulated as a constraint multi-objective optimization problem, which is solved by a multi-objective genetic algorithm, NSGA-II. Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) method, combined with Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS), is applied to evaluate the stochastic system performance. The potential of the proposed method has been demonstrated by a conceptual system design. A comparative study between the proposed robust method and the deterministic method presented in literature has been conducted. The results indicate that the proposed method can find a large mount of Pareto optimal system configurations with better compromising performance than the deterministic method. The trade-off information may be derived by a systematical comparison of these configurations. The proposed robust design method should be useful for hybrid power systems that require both optimality and robustness.