Optimisation for offshore wind farm cable connection layout using adaptive particle swarm optimisation minimum spanning tree method

The wind farm layout optimisation problem is similar to the classic mathematical problem of finding the minimum spanning tree (MST) of a weighted undirected graph. Due to the cable current‐carrying capacity limitation, the cable sectional area should be carefully selected to meet the system operational requirement and this constraint should be considered during the MST formulation process. Hence, traditional MST algorithm cannot ensure a minimal cable investment layout. In this study, a new method to optimise the offshore wind farm cable connection layout is presented. The algorithm is formulated based on the concept of MST and further improved by adaptive particle swarm optimisation algorithm. Since the location of the offshore substation (OS) has a significant impact on both the layout formulation and total cost of cables, the optimised location of OS is expected to be found together with the optimised cable connection layout. The proposed method is compared with the MST and dynamic MST methods and simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.