Norway: University of Bergen Hosts Offshore Wind Farm Optimization Workshop

Optimization Group of the Department of Informatics at the University of Bergen, Norway hosted an offshore wind farm optimisation workshop with an aim to identify the best layout in terms of turbine and substation positions and cable layout, given expected wind distributions and some development options.

Three speakers at this workshop were Gunner Larsen from DTU Risø, Mario Mommer from the Institute for Scientific Computing, University of Heidelberg and Jens Lysgaard from Aarhus University.

Gunner Larsen presented a Tool for Wind Farm Optimization (TOPFARM). TOPFARM takes the investors perspective and performs an economical optimization of a wind farm layout throughout the lifetime of the wind farm, as the economical optimization approach of wind farm layout differs significantly from the traditional power output optimization.

Mario Mommer, a mathematician with a PhD in numerical analysis, talked about optimization under uncertainty. His focus was on how to make the problem robust and the possibility of optimizing on rough solutions.

Another interesting topic regarding two programmation problems involving combinatorial optimization was: the capacitated vehicle routing problem and branch-and-cut ,presented by Jens Lysgaard, from the department of Economics and Business.

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Offshore WIND staff, November 5, 2013; Image: norcowe