Modified search strategies assisted crossover whale optimization algorithm with selection operator for parameter extraction of solar photovoltaic models

Abstract

Extracting accurate values for involved unknown parameters of solar photovoltaic (PV) models is very important for modeling PV systems. In recent years, the use of metaheuristic algorithms for this problem tends to be more popular and vibrant due to their e°cacy in solving highly nonlinear multimodal optimization problems. The whale optimization algorithm (WOA) is a relatively new and competitive metaheuristic algorithm. In this paper, an improved variant of WOA referred to as MCSWOA, is proposed to the parameter extraction of PV models. In MCSWOA, three improved components are integrated together: (i) Two modified search strategies named WOA/rand/1 and WOA/current-to-best/1 inspired by differential evolution are designed to balance the exploration and exploitation; (ii) a crossover operator based on the above modified search strategies is introduced to meet the search-oriented requirements of different dimensions; and (iii) a selection operator instead of the "generate-and-go" operator used in the original WOA is employed to prevent the population quality getting worse and thus to guarantee the consistency of evolutionary direction. The proposed MCSWOA is applied to five PV types. Both single diode and double diode models are used to model these five PV types. The good performance of MCSWOA is verified by various algorithms.