An Interactive Interface for Control Integration in Mid-Fidelity Wind Farm Simulation

Abstract

Wind farm control (WFC) plays a crucial role in mitigating the wake effect, the negative aerodynamic interactions among wind turbines. Recent advances in data-driven control and artificial intelligence offer new opportunities to design more intelligent WFC systems, motivating the need for a tool that supports interactive design and validation in simulation. To address this, we present ffconnect, a general, open-source Python-based interface for FAST.Farm, a mid-fidelity wind farm simulator. Compared to prior work, ffconnect introduces a restructured Application Programming Interface (API) with enriched state access and supports integrating FAST.Farm with modern scientific computing and machine learning ecosystems by building entirely on Python. In experiments, ffconnect shows negligible runtime overhead compared to the original FAST.Farm across a range of simulation lengths and farm sizes, and demonstrates its effectiveness through a yaw-tracking case study. Finally, we provide the source code of ffconnect to keep it accessible for general users.