Optimal Design of Wind Farm Collector System using a Novel Steiner Spanning Tree

Abstract

This poster paper addresses the issue of optimal cable layout design of a wind farm collector system. The objective is to minimize the total cable length which is the sum of length of all the branches of the collector system tree. We propose a graph theoretic solution and propose improvements to cater to the constraints of wind farm collector system. The solution is based on minimum spanning tree algorithm to connect the wind turbines with the minimal trenching length. Thereafter, to further minimize the trenching length, we propose a novel Steiner tree algorithm which finds a minimal path to connect the wind turbines. Our algorithm solves the problem in polynomial time with time complexity O(V 2), since finding a minimum Steiner spanning tree is a NP-hard problem.