Parameters Identification of Photovoltaic Models Using a Multi-Strategy Success-History-Based Adaptive Differential Evolution

Parameters identification of photovoltaic (PV) models based on measured current-voltage characteristics curves is significant for the simulation, evaluation and control of PV systems. To accurately and reliably identify the parameters of different PV models, a novel optimization algorithm, multi-strategy success-history based adaptive differential evolution with linear population size reduction (MLSHADE), is proposed. MLSHADE mainly divides evolutionary process into two phases during every generation. According to the definition of class probability variable, the population individuals of first phase are assigned to different two populations for exploration and exploitation, respectively. The novelty of MLSHADE algorithm lies primarily in three improvements: (i) a new weighted mutation strategy is used to enrich the population diversity of later iterations for differential evolution population in the first phase; (ii) inferior solutions search (ISS) technique is presented to avoid falling into local optimum for covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy population in the first phase; and (iii) Eigen Gaussian random walk strategy is proposed to help maintain effectively the balance between the global exploration and local exploitation abilities in the second phase. The experiments on CEC 2018 test suite illustrate that the proposed MLSHADE exerts the better performances against the stat-of-the-art algorithms in terms of accuracy, reliability and time consumption. The proposed MLSHADE is used to solve the parameters identification problems of different PV models including single diode, double diode, and PV module. Comprehensive experiment results and analyses indicate that MLSHADE can obtain a highly competitive performance compared with other state-of-the-art algorithms, especially in terms of accuracy and reliability.