Application of Supply-Demand-Based Optimization for Parameter Extraction of Solar Photovoltaic Models

Modeling solar photovoltaic (PV) systems accurately is based on optimal values of unknown model parameters of PV cells and modules. In recent years, the use of metaheuristics for parameter extraction of PV models gains more and more attentions thanks to their efficacy in solving highly nonlinear multimodal optimization problems. This work addresses a novel application of supply-demand-based optimization (SDO) to extract accurate and reliable parameters for PV models. SDO is a very young and efficient metaheuristic inspired by the supply and demand mechanism in economics. Its exploration and exploitation are balanced well by incorporating different dynamic modes of the cobweb model organically. To validate the feasibility and effectiveness of SDO, four PV models with diverse characteristics including RTC France silicon solar cell, PVM 752 GaAs thin film cell, STM6-40/36 monocrystalline module, and STP6-120/36 polycrystalline module are employed. The experimental results comparing with ten state-of-the-art algorithms demonstrate that SDO performs better or highly competitively in terms of accuracy, robustness, and convergence. In addition, the sensitivity of SDO to variation of population size is empirically investigated. The results indicate that SDO with a relatively small population size can extract accurate and reliable parameters for PV models.