Optimal placement of fixed hub height wind turbines in a wind farm using twin archive guided decomposition based multi-objective evolutionary algorithm

Abstract

Harnessing maximum wind energy's power output and efficiency is vital to combat environmental challenges tied to conventional fossil fuels. Wind power's cost-effectiveness and emission reduction potential underscore its significance. Efficient wind farm layout plays a pivotal role, both technically and commercially. Evolutionary algorithms show their potential while solving multi-objective wind farm layout optimization problems. However, due to the large-scale nature of the problems, existing algorithms are getting trapped into local optima and fail to explore the search space. To address this, the TAG-DMOEA algorithm is upgraded with an adaptive offspring strategy (AOG) for better exploration. The proposed algorithm is employed on a wind farm layout problem with real-time data of wind speed and direction from two different locations. Unlike mixed hub heights, fixed hub heights such as 60, 67, and 78 m are adopted to conduct the case studies at two potential locations with real-time statistical data for the investigation of improved results. The results obtained by TAG-DMOEA-AOG on six cases are compared with 10 state-of-the-art algorithms. Statistical tests such as Friedman test and Wilcoxon signed rank test along with post hoc analysis (Nemenyi test) confirmed the superiority of the TAG-DMOEA-AOG on all cases of the considered multi-objective wind farm layout optimization problem.