OptiWindNet

OptiWindNet Documentation¶

OptiWindNet: Wind Farm Electrical Network Optimizer
(distributed under the MIT License)

Python Package Index (PyPI)

https://pypi.org/project/optiwindnet/

Source code repository

https://gitlab.windenergy.dtu.dk/TOPFARM/OptiWindNet

Issue tracker

https://github.com/DTUWindEnergy/OptiWindNet/issues

Jupyter notebooks used in this manual

https://gitlab.windenergy.dtu.dk/TOPFARM/OptiWindNet/-/tree/main/docs/notebooks

About OptiWindNet¶

OptiWindNet is an electrical network design tool for offshore wind farms developed at the Technical University of Denmark – DTU. The package offers a framework to obtain optimal or near-optimal cable routes for a given turbine layout within the cable-laying boundaries. It provides high-level access to heuristic, meta-heuristic and mathematical optimization approaches to the problem.

The tool is distributed as the open-source Python package optiwindnet, which can be used either within an interactive Python session (e.g. Jupyter notebook) or as a library, by invoking OptiWindNet’s API directly from another application (e.g. TOPFARM, Ard).

What can OptiWindNet do?¶

  • Optimize the network of array cables (aka collection system, infield cables, internal grid, inter-array cables);

  • Route the cables to avoid exclusion zones and cable-to-cable crossings;

  • Assign cable types and calculate network costs;

  • Use different optimization approaches according to the preferred time/quality trade-off;

  • Employ user-provided models and objective functions within the mathematical optimization approach.

Getting Started¶

Setup your Python environment and check the Quickstart to begin using OptiWindNet.

How to Cite¶

A peer-reviewed scientific article explaining the OptiWindNet framework and benchmarking it against state-of-the-art methods is available (open-access) at:

  • Mauricio Souza de Alencar, Tuhfe Göçmen, Nicolaos A. Cutululis, Flexible cable routing framework for wind farm collection system optimization, European Journal of Operational Research, 2025, ISSN 0377-2217, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2025.07.069.

@article{
    SOUZADEALENCAR2025,
    title = {Flexible cable routing framework for wind farm collection system optimization},
    journal = {European Journal of Operational Research},
    year = {2025},
    issn = {0377-2217},
    doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2025.07.069},
    url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221725005946},
    author = {Mauricio {Souza de Alencar} and Tuhfe Göçmen and Nicolaos A. Cutululis},
    keywords = {Combinatorial optimization, Network design, Collection system, Wind farm},
}

The OptiWindNet software package can be cited (unversioned) as:

Souza de Alencar, M., Arasteh, A., & Friis-Møller, M. (2026). OptiWindNet by DTU Wind Energy. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18388438

To cite a specific version, get the version-specific DOI at OptiWindNet’s entry at Zenodo. Select the desired version on the right column and use one of the ready-to-use citation formats available at the bottom right of that page.

Acknowledgements¶

The development of OptiWindNet was carried out as part of a Ph.D. project at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU Wind), financially supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark / Danmarks Frie Forskningsfond (DFF) under grant no. 1127-00188B, project Integrated Design of Offshore Wind Power Plants.

The heuristics implemented in this repository (release 0.0.1) are presented and analyzed in the MSc thesis Optimization heuristics for offshore wind power plant collection systems design (DTU Wind - Technical University of Denmark, July 4, 2022).

The meta-heuristic used is vidalt/HGS-CVRP — a modern implementation of the hybrid genetic search (HGS) algorithm specialized to the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP), including an additional neighborhood called SWAP* — via its Python bindings mdealencar/HybGenSea.

The cable routing relies on a navigation mesh generated by the library artem-ogre/CDT (Constrained Delaunay Triangulation, C++) via its Python bindings artem-ogre/PythonCDT.

Documentation Contents¶