Wind Farm Layout Optimization with Diffusion Models

Wind farms generate electricity from wind, offering a sustainable and eco-friendly power source.In wind farms, determining the positions of wind turbines is crucial for high energy production due to complex wake interactions.However, optimizing wind farm layouts for given wind conditions remains challenging.While existing methods try to solve the problem by training a surrogate model and employing optimization algorithms based on the model, these methods require a large number of simulations to obtain highly productive layouts, which is time-consuming in large-scale tasks.Furthermore, they mostly yield less diverse layouts, making the deployment of such layouts into real-world scenarios difficult.To address these challenges, we introduce a novel conditional generative modeling approach to find wind farm layouts that maximize energy production.Our method consists of four stages.First, we collect datasets that consist of layouts and their corresponding annual energy production (AEP).Then, we train a diffusion model conditioned on AEP and wind scenarios using the collected dataset.Specifically, we use a Graph Neural Network as the backbone for the denoising network to ensure permutation invariance.Next, we sample promising layouts from the trained diffusion model by conditioning with a high AEP and given wind scenario.We also introduce a local search algorithm, which enables us to adjust layouts that violate design constraints.Finally, we evaluate the generated layouts and augment the dataset.We repeat these processes iteratively to further optimize the layouts.Throughout these processes, we effectively generate highly productive and diverse wind farm layouts in a sample-efficient manner.Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in maximizing energy production across various scenarios.