Constrained Multi-Objective Wind Farm Layout Optimization: Introducing a Novel Constraint Handling Approach Based on Constraint Programming

Recently, land has been exploited extensively for onshore wind farms and turbines are frequently located in proximity to human dwellings, natural habitats, and infrastructure. This proximity has made land use constraints and noise generation and propagation matters of increasing concern for all stakeholders. Hence, wind farm layout optimization approaches should be able to consider and address these concerns. In this study, we perform a constrained multi-objective wind farm layout optimization considering energy and noise as objective functions, and considering land use constraints arising from landowner participation, environmental setbacks and proximity to existing infrastructure. The optimization problem is solved with the NSGA-II algorithm, a multi-objective, continuous variable Genetic Algorithm. A novel hybrid constraint handling tool that uses penalty functions together with Constraint Programming algorithms is introduced. This constraint handling tool performs a combination of local and global searches to find feasible solutions. After verifying the performance of the proposed constraint handling approach with a suite of test functions, it is used together with NSGA-II to optimize a set of wind farm layout optimization test cases with different number of turbines and under different levels of land availability (constraint severity). The optimization results illustrate the potential of the new constraint handling approach to outperform existing constraint handling approaches, leading to better solutions with fewer evaluations of the objective functions and constraints.