A distributed algorithm for NMPC-based wind farm control

Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) has been identified as a highly promising control technique for wind turbine generators, and has been shown to be realtime feasible for the control of individual wind turbines. The potential benefit of performing control at the wind farm level is well understood, and has been recently investigated in the literature. Likewise, the extension of NMPC from wind turbine to wind farm control is highly desirable, but very challenging since it requires solving large non-convex optimal control problems in real time. It has not been considered so far in the literature. This paper proposes a first contribution in that direction, using a distributed optimisation approach based on the Lagrange relaxation. The proposed algorithm requires a very limited amount of additional computations when compared to controlling the wind turbines individually via NMPC. The problem of smoothing the wind farm power output is considered here.