Mayo, MichaelZheng, Chen2016-11-3020162016-11-302016Mayo, M., & Zheng, C. (2016). BlockCopy-based operators for evolving efficient wind farm layouts. In Proceedings of 2016 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, 24-29 July 2016, Vancouver, Canada (pp. 1085–1092). Washington, DC, USA: IEEE. http://doi.org/10.1109/CEC.2016.7743909978-1-5090-0622-9https://hdl.handle.net/10289/10777A novel search operator, BlockCopy, is proposed for efficiently solving the wind farm layout optimisation problem. BlockCopy, which can be used either as mutation or a crossover operator, copies patterns of turbines from part of a layout to another part. The target layout may be the same as the source, or a different layout altogether. The rationale behind this is that it is the relative configurations of turbines rather than their individual absolute positions on the layouts that count, and BlockCopy, for the most part, maintains relative configurations. Our evaluation on four benchmark scenarios shows that BlockCopy outperforms two other standard approaches (namely, the turbine displacement algorithm and random perturbation) from the literature. We also evaluate the BlockCopy operator in conjunction with both singlesolution and population-based strategies.application/pdfenThis is an author’s accepted version of an article published in the Proceedings of 2016 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation. © 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.computer sciencewind farm layout optimisation problemevolutionary strategysearch operatorcost of energyturbine displacement algorithmwind farm layout optimisation problemevolutionary strategysearch operatorcost of energyturbine displacement algorithmcomputer scienceMachine learningConference Contribution10.1109/CEC.2016.7743909