Optimal Micro-siting of Wind Farms by Particle Swarm Optimization

This paper proposes a novel approach to optimal placement of wind turbines in the continuous space of a wind farm. The control objective is to maximize the power produced by a farm with a fixed number of turbines while guaranteeing the distance between turbines no less than the allowed minimal distance for turbine operation safety. The problem of wind farm micro-siting with space constraints is formulated to a constrained optimization problem and solved by a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm based on penalty functions. Simulation results demonstrate that the PSO approach is more suitable and effective for micro-siting than the classical binary-coded genetic algorithms.