Automatic Wind Farm Road Network
Parametric Design, Terrain Analysis, Generative Design
The travelling salesman problem with a hillside attached. A Grasshopper tool that permits a road segment only where the ground grade allows one, then runs generative design through what is left, so the route across a 100-turbine wind farm comes back buildable rather than merely short.
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- Sheet 02-14
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Definition
In
Steps
Out
Note
Background
Access road layout across a 100-turbine wind farm on steep terrain is a routing problem with a buildability constraint attached. The shortest route between turbines is frequently the one you cannot build.
The problem
Starting from the travelling salesman problem, finding the most efficient route connecting a group of turbine locations, the optimal 2D path is often unbuildable because of hillside gradients.
What I built
The tool projects a grid of points onto the existing ground surface, creating a network of connecting lines between them. Road segments are only permitted where the grade between adjacent points falls below a user-defined threshold. Flatter surfaces produce shorter connecting lines; steep areas produce longer lines that get filtered out.
Generative design then optimises the route through this grade-constrained network, finding the best achievable path that respects both 2D efficiency and 3D buildability.
Outcome
The design team got rapid access to buildable route options that manual layout could not produce at the same speed. Graph-theory optimisation against real terrain constraints is standard in logistics and operations research and rare in civil infrastructure layout in a parametric environment.