Automatic Identification of Closed-Loop Wind Turbine Dynamics via Genetic Programming

Wind turbines are nonlinear systems that operate in turbulent environments. As such, their behavior is difficult to characterize accurately across a wide range of operating conditions by physically meaningful models. Customarily, data-based models of wind turbines are defined in ‘black box’ format, lacking in both conciseness and physical intelligibility. To address this deficiency, we identify models of a modern horizontal-axis wind turbine in symbolic form using a recently developed symbolic regression method. The method used relies on evolutionary multi-objective optimization to produce succinct dynamic models from operational data without ‘a priori’ knowledge of the system. We compare the produced models with models derived by other methods for their estimation capacity and evaluate the tradeoff between model intelligibility and accuracy. Several succinct models are found that predict wind turbine behavior as well as or better than more complex alternatives derived by other methods.