  Ocean wave energy is a source of renewable energy that has gained much
attention for its potential to contribute significantly to meeting the global
energy demand. In this research, we investigate the problem of maximising the
energy delivered by farms of wave energy converters (WEC's). We consider
state-of-the-art fully submerged three-tether converters deployed in arrays.
The goal of this work is to use heuristic search to optimise the power output
of arrays in a size-constrained environment by configuring WEC locations and
the power-take-off (PTO) settings for each WEC. Modelling the complex
hydrodynamic interactions in wave farms is expensive, which constrains search
to only a few thousand model evaluations. We explore a variety of heuristic
approaches including cooperative and hybrid methods. The effectiveness of these
approaches is assessed in two real wave scenarios (Sydney and Perth) with farms
of two different scales. We find that a combination of symmetric local search
with Nelder-Mead Simplex direct search combined with a back-tracking
optimization strategy is able to outperform previously defined search
techniques by up to 3\%.
