Optimisation of offshore wind farm collection systems‐based on modified genetic algorithm

The capital cost of the collection system that supports a large off shore wind farm constitutes a significant proportion of the total cost of the wind farm. Thus, finding the optimal design of this collection system is an important task. In order to get the appropriate topological structure of collection system of off shore wind farm, a cost model is proposed first. Then, the topology optimisation problem is formulated into a minimum cost spanning tree problem. After that, modified genetic algorithm (GA) is used to solve the problem. The algorithm improves the GA in coding mode and genetic operator. The case study shows that the modified GA is more effective and converges faster.