[alife] Wind Farm Layout Optimization Competition @ GECCO 2014

[Sylvain Cussat-Blanc]

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Wind Farm Layout Optimization Competition

@GECCO-14, Vancouver, Canada

July 12-16, 2014

www.irit.fr/wind-competition

Submission deadline: June 1st => Extended to June 15th!
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Dear colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the first competition on Wind Farm Layout Optimization. This competition will be held in conjunction with GECCO conference in Vancouver, Canada, July 12-16, 2014.

Description of the competition
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Wind farm design has long been an application domain for evolutionary learning and optimization due to the complexity of the design space, and the discontinuities in the search space caused by the wake effects that make it hard to optimize analytically. Now, with a need to increase the renewable energy portfolio, existing wind farm layout approaches are being tested under a variety of scenarios. Newer models to evaluate layouts and newer constraints emerge, demanding more sophistication from the algorithms.

We propose the following competition to enable a basis of comparison for the existing algorithms and to encourage new ways to solve the wind optimization problem. As part of the competition, we will provide layout evaluators, wind field conditions, and baseline performances for the different layout optimization problems. Competitors are expected to contribute to an open source library for wind farm layout optimization.

This competition aims to bring more realistic problems to algorithm developers and to create an open source library useful beyond the scope of this competition. Historically, stochastic search has been the basis of the best approaches to solving the wind farm layout optimization problem, and as the industry continues to develop new models, constraints, and situations, it is timely that we propose a method for the integration of these two communities. This competition sets the stage for that integration.

Competition details
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The competition schedule is tentatively as follows:
March 15, 2014: Provided layouts and wake model code online
May 10, 2014: Automated submission system and live leader board online
June 1, 2014: Final submission deadline => Extended to June 15th

The competition goal will be split in two tracks:
       • Fixed number of turbines - optimize the energy capture of a layout by determining the placement of a fixed number of turbines.
       • Variable number of turbines - place the most turbines in a layout given a minimum energy capture requirement for each turbine.
While the first problem is the most common in the wind farm layout optimization community, the latter allows for a more realistic challenge. The cost-benefit analysis of adding a turbine to a field, here simply based on energy capture, could be expanded to include local constraints such as price, cabling, and terrain.

During the competition, contestants will be given:
       • a set of 5 completely new scenarios and layouts to optimize,
       • 5000 layout evaluations for the 5 layouts
As the layout evaluation is usually the most computationally part of the optimization, this allotment adds the challenge of computational resource efficiency. Competitors must design effective stop criteria for their algorithms. The evaluation API is available on github: https://github.com/d9w/wind-competition

Competitors will be allowed to enter either or both tracks and rankings and prizes will be given for each track. They will be compared on each layout to optimize according to the energy output for the first track and the number of turbines implanted on the second track (and energy output for ex-aequo) and ranked with point system:
       • 10 points given to the best approach
       • 6 points given to the second best approach
       • 4 points to the third
       • 3 points to the forth
       • 2 points to the fifth
       • 1 point to the sixth
The winner of each track will be the one with the maximum of points.

Prize
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We are doing our best to secure a prize for the competition winner. We will propose to include the best approaches in the open-source WindFLO library, used to evaluate the layouts.

More information
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Please visit the competition website: www.irit.fr/wind-competition

Feel free to contact us for more information:
       • Dennis Wilson: dennisw at mit.edu
       • Sylvain Cussat-Blanc: sylvain.cussat-blanc at irit.fr
       • Kalyan Veeramachaneni: kalyan at csail.mit.edu