Wind farm layout optimization using ant colony and particle filtering approaches

Renewable energy resources are important equity capital of countries and have increasing trends in terms of continuity and sustainability of energy production. Wind energy has begun to have an important share in energy production with the improvements in wind turbine technology and decrease in costs. Generally, investors prefer to wind farms, which consist of more than one wind turbines, in order to produce more energy in a single windy site. On the other hand, one of the most important problems that decrease the profitableness of a wind farms is wake effect which causes the decrease on maximum expected energy production. In this study, layout of wind turbines that gives the maximum energy production of a wind farm is optimized and this is known as wind farm layout optimization problem. Because the problem is NP-hard, heuristic approaches are used in order to solve the problem. One of the solution approaches of this study is Ant Colony Optimization which gives competent results in many optimization problems. The other approach is Particle Filtering approach which has been never applied in an optimization problem before. Experimental results show that the proposed approaches give better results than the best known solutions of the problem.