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Marine currents have been identified as a considerable renewable energy source. Therefore, in recent years, research on optimising tidal stream farm layouts in order to maximise power output has emerged. Traditionally, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models are used to model power output, but their computational cost is prohibitive within an optimisation algorithm. This paper uses surrogate models in place of CFD simulations to optimise the layout of tidal stream farm layouts. Surrogates are functions which are designed to emulate the behaviour of other models with radically reduced computational expense. Two surrogate models are applied and compared: artificial neural network (ANN) and k-nearest neighbours regression (k-NN). We measure their suitability by four criteria: accuracy, efficiency, robustness and performance within an optimisation algorithm. The results reveal that the ANN surrogate is …