A Mixed Integer Linear Programming Formulation for Unrestricted Wind Farm Layout Optimization

This paper proposes a mixed integer linear programming formulation of the unrestricted wind farm layout optimization problem. The formulation is achieved in part by changing the objective from power generation maximization to the maximization of the smallest penalized downstream distance between any pair of turbines, where downstream distance is defined as the distance between any pair of turbines with overlapping wake cones. The proposed formulation also linearizes other non-linear characteristics of the unrestricted layout optimization problem such as proximity constraints and wake-cone membership. The main advantage of the proposed approach is that an optimal solution to the proposed formulation is guaranteed to be globally optimal. This is in contrast to previous approaches with non-linear formulations that do not come with such guarantees.