  Design of wave energy converter farms entails multiple domains that are
coupled, and thus, their concurrent representation and consideration in
early-stage design optimization has the potential to offer new insights and
promising solutions with improved performance. Concurrent optimization of
physical attributes (e.g., plant) and the control system design is often known
as control co-design or CCD. To further improve performance, the layout of the
farm must be carefully optimized in order to ensure that constructive effects
from hydrodynamic interactions are leveraged, while destructive effects are
avoided. The variations in the joint probability distribution of waves,
stemming from distinct site locations, affect the farm's performance and can
potentially influence decisions regarding optimal plant selection, control
strategies, and layout configurations. Therefore, this paper undertakes a
concurrent exploration of control co-design and layout optimization for a farm
comprising five devices, modeled as heaving cylinders in the frequency domain,
situated across four distinct site locations: Alaskan Coasts, East Coast,
Pacific Islands, and West Coast. The challenge of efficiently and accurately
estimating hydrodynamic coefficients within the optimization loop was mitigated
through the application of surrogate modeling and many-body expansion
principles. Results indicate the optimized solutions exhibit variations in
plant, control, and layout for each candidate site, signifying the importance
of system-level design with environmental considerations from the early stages
of the design process.
