Offshore wind farm design with the Coral Reefs Optimization algorithm

This paper presents a novel algorithm for wind farm design and layout optimization: the Coral Reefs Optimization algorithm (CRO). The CRO is a novel bio-inspired approach, based on the simulation of reef formation and coral reproduction. The CRO is fully described and detailed in this paper, and then applied to the design of a real offshore wind farm in northern Europe. It is shown that the CRO outperforms the results of alternative algorithms in this problem, such as Evolutionary Approaches, Differential Evolution or Harmony Search algorithms. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.