A heuristic approach to optimize radial inter-array cabling topologies in large wind power plants

We propose and analyze an algorithm for planning the topology of the inter-array cables that, in a wind power plant (WPP), link the wind turbine generators (WTGs) to the substation. The approach embeds a heuristic step that significantly reduces the complexity of planning the radial inter-array cable topology for large WPPs, which is generally an NP-hard mixed-integer linear programming problem. The heuristic seeks to reduce the number of decision variables by utilizing user-defined parameters to exploit characteristics of the WPPs layouts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the heuristic by comparing its cost-saving potentials against another state-of-the-art method on three use-cases regarding real WPPs. In terms of solution quality, the results indicate that, among all study cases, the proposed strategy either compares favorably or has a similar performance to the method from the literature.