Offshore wind farms (OWFs) have a high utilization potential; however, their initial investment cost is very high. This study proposes a binary integer programming-based optimization framework for designing OWF inter-array systems. To alleviate the combinatorial growth of candidate connections, the k-nearest neighbors scheme and the Bentley–Ottmann algorithm were applied to generate a reduced candidate-arc set and identify crossing arc pairs. Based on the reduced candidate set, the proposed model simultaneously determined the inter-array topology and submarine cable types while minimizing the life-cycle total cost. The model accounted for the coupling between wind turbine failures and cable-loss reduction and considered spare cables to reflect practical maintenance practices. Case studies on 60 and 400 MW OWFs demonstrated that the proposed preprocessing reduced the number of arc pairs requiring crossing checks from 3240 to 50 and from 16,110 to 49 (reductions of 98.5% and 99.7%, respectively). The coupled loss model reduced the power-loss cost by 10.91% and 10.72%, respectively, and the inclusion of the spare-cable cost led to a lower total life-cycle cost through topology and cable-type reconfiguration. In conclusion, the proposed methodology may achieve economic efficiency and reliability of OWF inter-array system design.
Shin et al. (Sat,) studied this question.