Value-oriented policy distillation for interpretable wind farm power control

Existing noise mitigation strategies for wind farms usually consist in reducing turbines power output, without accounting for the wake interactions between them and the noise emission directivity. This leads to over-conservative policies and unexploited wind power. Yet, turbine yaw can simultaneously affect wake interactions and the direction of noise emission, offering an additional degree of freedom for farm-level noise control. We therefore propose Noise Steering, a model-free reinforcement learning (RL) strategy that jointly controls turbine yaw angles and power setpoints to maximise farm power while satisfying a local noise constraint in a defined region. To enable training at a reduced computational cost, a low-fidelity acoustic model is coupled with the steady-state FLORIS simulator. The RL agent effectively learns how to redirect wakes and noise directivity away from the protected region while redistributing power across the farm. On a six-turbine test farm, the policy satisfies the 40 dB noise constraint throughout the full range of turbulent winds, with an average power deficit of only 2% relative to greedy unimpeded control, and up to 7.7% at high wind speeds. In comparison, the industry-standard noise-reduced operation (NRO) baseline here generates an average power loss of 17%. When deployed in the higher-fidelity FASTFarm simulator, the policy largely retains its performance under steady and turbulent inflow, despite differences in simulation fidelity. These results demonstrate the potential of combining yaw control and power derating through RL to improve the power-noise trade-off in wind farm operation.

Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising approach for adaptive wind farm flow control, yet its practical deployment is hindered by slow training convergence and poor initial performance, factors that could translate to years of reduced power output if an untrained agent were deployed directly. This work investigates whether domain knowledge from steady-state wake models can accelerate RL training and improve initial controller performance. We propose a pretraining methodology in which expert demonstrations are generated by deploying a PyWake-based steady-state optimizer within a dynamic wake simulation (WindGym), then used to initialize both the actor and critic networks of a Soft Actor-Critic agent via behavior cloning. Experiments on a 2x2 wind farm show that pretraining eliminates the costly initial learning phase: while an untrained agent underperforms the greedy zero-yaw baseline by approximately 12%, pretraining raises initial performance to near-baseline levels. During online fine-tuning, all configurations converge within 250,000 environment steps to achieve similar performance, ultimately exceeding that of a lookup-table controller, which reaches approximately 7% power gain after 500,000 steps.

This study presents a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework for load-constrained wind farm flow control (WFFC). While wake steering can enhance total wind farm power, it often introduces increased structural loads on downstream turbines. To address this, we integrate an Independent Soft Actor-Critic (I-SAC) architecture with a data-driven, local inflow sector-averaged surrogate model to provide real-time estimates of Damage Equivalent Loads (DELs). By incorporating these estimates into a shaped reward function, turbine-specific agents are trained to maximize power production while adhering to specific load-increase thresholds ($Δ_{max}$) of 10%, 20%, and 30% relative to a baseline controller. The framework is implemented within the WindGym environment using the DYNAMIKS flow solver with Dynamic Wake Meandering (DWM) model to capture non-stationary wake physics. Results indicate that the MARL agents successfully learn collaborative policies that prioritise power gain while actively retreating from high-DEL control strategies.