  In this paper we study the problem of optimal layout of an offshore wind farm
to minimize the wake effect impacts. Considering the specific requirements of
concerned offshore wind farm, we propose an adaptive genetic algorithm (AGA)
which introduces location swaps to replace random crossovers in conventional
GAs. That way the total number of turbines in the resulting layout will be
effectively kept to the initially specified value. We experiment the proposed
AGA method on three cases with free wind speed of 12 m/s, 20 m/s, and a typical
offshore wind distribution setting respectively. Numerical results verify the
effectiveness of our proposed algorithm which achieves a much faster
convergence compared to conventional GA algorithms.
