Advances and Challenges in Wave Energy Park Optimization—A Review

A commercial wave energy system will typically consist of many interacting wave energy converters installed in a park. The performance of the park depends on many parameters such as array layout and number of devices, and may be evaluated based on different measures such as energy absorption, electricity quality, or cost of the produced electricity. As wave energy is currently at the stage where several large-scale installations are being planned, optimizing the park performance is an active research area, with many important contributions in the past few years. Here, this research is reviewed, with focus on identifying the current state-of-the-art, analyzing how realistic, reliable and relevant the methods and the results are, and outlining directions for future research.