Site Assessment and Layout Optimization for Rooftop Solar Energy Generation in Worldview-3 Imagery

With the growth of residential rooftop PV adoption in recent decades, the problem of 1 effective layout design has become increasingly important in recent years. Although a number 2 of automated methods have been introduced, these tend to rely on simplifying assumptions and 3 heuristics to improve computational tractability. We demonstrate a fully automated layout design 4 pipeline that attempts to solve a more general formulation with greater geometric flexibility that 5 accounts for shading losses. Our approach generates rooftop areas from satellite imagery and uses 6 MINLP optimization to select panel positions, azimuth angles and tilt angles on an individual basis 7 rather than imposing any predefined layouts. Our results demonstrate that although several common 8 heuristics are often effective, they may not be universally suitable due to complications resulting 9 from geometric restrictions and shading losses. Finally, we evaluate a few specific heuristics from the 10 literature and propose a potential new rule of thumb that may help improve rooftop solar energy 11 potential when shading effects are considered.