A simulated-annealing-based approach for wind farm cabling

We study the problem of computing a wind farm cabling with minimum costs allowing different cable types. Our model distinguishes different levels of granularity, where the highest level represents the cabling problem for the whole wind farm. Since even the most restricted of these problems is NP-hard, we introduce a novel Simulated Annealing approach for solving the cabling problem. While previous work focuses on few and small instances, often with less than 50 turbines, our simulations show that our approach gives good results on a varied benchmark set of complex large-scale wind farms 1. For wind farms with up to 450 turbines it outperforms our mixed-integer linear program in terms of quality and running time.