An adaptive differential evolution with decomposition for photovoltaic parameter extraction

Photovoltaic (PV) parameter extraction plays a key role in establishing accurate and reliable PV models based on the manufacturer's current-voltage data. Owning to the characteristics such as implicit and nonlinear of the PV model, it remains a challenging and research-meaningful task in PV system optimization. Despite there are many methods that have been developed to solve this problem, they are often consuming a great deal of computing resources for more satisfactory results. To reduce computing resources, in this paper, an advanced differential evolution with search space decomposition is developed to effectively extract the unknown parameters of PV models. In proposed approach, a recently proposed advanced differential evolution algorithm is used as a solver. In addition, a search space decomposition technique is introduced to reduce the dimension of the problem, thereby reducing the complexity of the problem. Three different PV cell models are selected for verifying the performance of proposed approach. The experimental result is firstly compared with some representative differential evolution algorithms that do not use search space decomposition technique, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the search space decomposition. Moreover, the comparison results with some reported well-established parameter extraction methods suggest that the proposed approach not only obtains accurate and reliable parameters, but also uses the least computational resources.