A Reliability-Oriented Metaheuristic Strategy to Optimize the Collection Grid of Offshore Wind Farms

This paper applies bio-inspired optimization techniques to the interconnection planning of offshore wind farms. More specifically, the Bat Algorithm and the Grey Wolf Optimizer are applied to solve the problem. Reliability and economic criteria related to wind farms are considered. The study is based on radial topologies due to their simplicity and lower investment. The proposed method is applied to a test system and to a real system, both retrieved from the literature. The former constitutes a tutorial implementation, whereas the latter demonstrates the method's viability regarding real applications. The carried out research shows that the problem should have an approach based on multi-objective optimization, thus considering cost and reliability simultaneously. In other words, inserting the reliability criterion in interconnection optimization problems helps secure more viable collection grids