A Modified Grid Diversity Operator for Discrete Optimization and its Application to Wind Farm Layout Optimization Problems
Ahmed Salah, Emma Hart · 2016
One of the important factors for any effective metaheuristic optimization algorithms is its ability to maintain a diverse population throughout the generations. Specifically, diversity maintenance can lead to exploration of novel areas of the search space, and hence potentially locate better solutions. Recently, a novel diversity technique called the Grid Diversity Operator was introduced, providing improved results on a suite of continuous optimization problems. Here, we extend the grid diversity operator to support discrete optimization problems and validate its performance by experimenting with a range of wind farm layout optimization problem scenarios. The experimental results showed performance improvements for the quality of solutions found especially for the farm scenarios with obstacles.