An Integer Programming Model for Branching Cable Layouts in Offshore Wind Farms

An integer programming model for minimizing the cabling costs of offshore wind farms which allows for branching of the cables is developed. Model features include upper bounds on the number of cable branches made at any wind turbine, upper bounds on the cable loads, and exclusion of crossing cable segments. The resulting model resembles the capacitated minimum spanning tree problem, with the addition of degree and planarity constraints. Numerical experiments with realistic wind farm data indicate that the benefit from branching is small when using only one cable type, but is up to 13 % if allowing for two different cable types.