Design of a parallel genetic algorithm for continuous and pattern-free heliostat field optimization

The heliostat field of solar power tower plants can suppose up to 50% of investment costs and 40% of energy loss. Unfortunately, obtaining an optimal field requires facing a complex non-convex, continuous, large-scale, and constrained optimization problem. Although pattern-based layouts and iterative deployment are popular heuristics to simplify the problem, they limit flexibility and might be suboptimal. This work describes a new genetic algorithm for continuous and pattern-free heliostat field optimization. Considering the potential computational cost of the objective function and the necessity of broad explorations, it has been adapted to run in parallel on shared-memory environments. It relies on elitism, uniform crossover, static penalization of infeasibility, and tournament selection. Interesting experimental results show an optimization speedup up to 15× with 16 threads. It could approximately reduce a one year runtime, at complete optimization, to a month only. The optimizer has also been made available as a generic C++ library.