Information sharing search boosted whale optimizer with Nelder-Mead simplex for parameter estimation of photovoltaic models

With the recent emphasis on new energy sources, solar photovoltaic cells have received widespread attention from scholars as a highly efficient and clean new energy source. Researchers model solar photovoltaic cells and analyze the values of various unknown parameters to improve their efficiency in converting solar energy into electric energy. To extract unknown parameters more accurately and efficiently, we propose a whale optimi-zation algorithm (WOA) driven by the information sharing search mechanism and the Nelder-Mead simplex (NMs) mechanism, which ISNMWOA. The WOA can perform a global search of the parameters of the photo-voltaic model to obtain a number of initial vectors of model parameters that satisfy the parameter range. The information sharing search strategy performs a further coarse local search on a number of feasible solutions generated. In contrast, the NMs can perform a further refined local search in the vicinity of the optimal pa-rameters to obtain the final vector of optimally performing model parameters. First, we tested ISNMWOA against six advanced algorithms in CEC 2014. We then used the ISNMWOA to evaluate the parameters of the solar cells and PV modules. The RMSE of ISNMWOA on single diode model (SDM), double diode model (DDM), three diode model (TDM), and photovoltaic module model (PV) are 9.8602E-04, 9.8248E-04, 9.8248E-04 and 2.4251E-03 respectively. Compared to the original WOA, the RMSE of ISNMWOA on SDM, DDM, TDM, and PV decreased by 30.01%, 24.24%, 50.98%, and 6.94%, respectively. Moreover, compared to the high-performing GOFPANM, ISNMWOA runs 298 times faster than GOFPANM with almost identical optimization results. We evaluated the performance of three commercial PV modules under different irradiance and temperature conditions using ISNMWOA to verify the reliability of the experiment. The experimental results show that the ISNMWOA out-performs similar algorithms currently available.