The offshore wind farm array cable layout problem: a planar open vehicle routing problem

In an offshore wind farm, the turbines are connected to a transformer by cable routes which cannot cross each other. Finding the minimum cost array cable layout thus amounts to a vehicle routing problem with the additional constraints that the routes must be embedded in the plane. For this problem, both exact and heuristic methods are of interest. We optimize cable layouts for real-world offshore wind farms by a hop-indexed integer programming formulation, and develop a heuristic for computing layouts based on the Clarke and Wright savings heuristic for vehicle routing. Our heuristic computes layouts on average only 2% more expensive than the optimal layout. Finally, we present two problem extensions arising from real-world offshore wind farm cable layouts, and adapt the integer programming formulation to one of them. The thus obtained optimal layouts are up to 13% cheaper than the actually installed layouts.