Flexible and efficient site constraint handling for wind farm layout optimization

Wind farm sites can have complex, disconnected shapes and may encompass exclusion zones. Even offshore this is the case, due to sea lanes, underwater pipelines and cables, wrecks, and unidentified buried objects. An example is Borssele Wind Farm Site IV1 (BWFS IV), which is pictured in Figure 11 as the collection of greencolored parcels. Within BWFS IV, as shown in Figure 21, there is an archaeologically significant wreck—red boat—and multiple magnetic anomalies— green dots—that indicate buried objects. Furthermore, regulations require turbines to be placed a certain safety distance—one rotor radius— inside the parcels.