Experimental study on the Wind Farm Substation Cable Installation Problem

The planning of wind farms exhibits several interesting problems. One of them is the minimum cost cable installation in wind farms. In this master thesis we regard a subproblem of it, namely the Substation Cable Installation Problem (SCIP). The SCIP deals with the minimum cable installation connecting wind turbines to a substation. It is therefore defined as follows: Given a set of coordinates for a substation and for a set of turbines, the turbines’ rating and a set of cable types, find the cost minimal cable installation such that all turbines are connected to the substation and the capacity constraints imposed by the installation are met. For this problem we identify several approaches from the literature for the SCIP as well as for related problems. We have adapted and implemented a part of these identified approaches. The implementation contains nine algorithms and heuristics which are presented in the main part of this thesis. Among them there is also a new integer linear program formulation and a new heuristic. Furthermore, we evaluate and compare the implemented algorithms and heuristics.