Optimized Pattern Design for Photovoltaic Power Stations

The task of planning photovoltaic (PV) power plants is very challenging. The decision makers have to consider the local weather conditions, the land area’s topography, the physical behavior of the technical components and many more complex aspects. We present an approach for optimizing one variant of the way routing problem for PV plants. We formulate the problem as an Integer Program (IP) which can be solved by standard solvers. In addition, we reformulate the IP as a maximum independent set problem on interval graphs. This graph-theoretic problem can be solved in polynomial time. Using the latter approach, we are able to generate a variety of solutions with different angles for the ways with little effort of time.