Arne Klein (Department of Informatics): Optimizing cable routes in offshore wind

Arne Klein is a PhD-student from the Department of Informatics. He visited the Energy Lab lunch meeting on the 17^th of January to present some of the work he has been doing during his thesis.

Arne is working on how to optimise cable routes in offshore wind farms. In such a problem, Arne wants to find optimal cable paths in a wind farm in order to minimize the total cable length and thus the total cost of the cables. He uses a mathematical model to solve an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem, which is implemented in Python and solved by CPLEX.

In an experimental study of the Walney 1 wind farm, Arne was able to achieve cost savings as high as 14 % on total cable costs. This is a significant improvement based on a applying a “free” optimisation method.

You can read more in Arne’s presentation here, and if you are interested in more details Arne has published a paper on this topic.