The bionic method to optimize the turbine layout of wind farm on complex terrain is developed. By employing the virtual particle model for wake flow simulation, the bionic method runs based on the flow field calculated by numerical simulations of air flow. It simulates the evolution of a turbine layout by performing the locating and relocating processes of the turbines. Optimized layouts for four different cases are obtained with the target of maximizing the total power output. The outcomes are compared with the layouts optimized by genetic algorithm with the linear wake flow model. The analysis results demonstrate that the bionic method produces solutions with higher power output than the previous approaches for all the studied situations. The present method is tested for different densities of area discretization. The result indicates that the bionic method can be applied with high resolution at very low time cost. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.