The Constrained Layer Tree Problem and Applications to Solar Farm Cabling

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Constrained Layer Tree problem motivated by solar farm cabling, providing an efficient dynamic programming solution that significantly outperforms MILP methods and can be used to improve practical cabling solutions.

Contribution

It presents a novel dynamic programming algorithm for the Constrained Layer Tree problem, demonstrating its effectiveness and practical relevance to solar farm cabling.

Findings

Dynamic programming outperforms MILP by orders of magnitude.

The problem is central to solar farm cabling optimization.

Feasible solutions can bootstrap MILP for better results.

Abstract

Motivated by the cabling of solar farms, we study the problem Constrained Layer Tree. At its core, it asks whether there exists a tree that connects a set of sources (the leaves) to one sink (the root) such that certain capacity constraints at the inner nodes are satisfied. Our main algorithmic contribution is a dynamic program with various optimizations for Constrained Layer Tree. It outperforms the previously used MILP by multiple orders of magnitude. Moreover, our experiments show that the somewhat abstract problem Constrained Layer Tree is actually the core of the cabling problem in solar farms, i.e., the feasible solution produced by our dynamic program can be used to bootstrap an MILP that can then find good solutions for the original cabling problem efficiently.