Quantum Nelder‐Mead Hunger Games Search for optimizing photovoltaic solar cells

Abstract

The inherent multimodal and nonlinear characteristics of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems make it challenging to accurately extract PV parameters. Therefore, this study proposes an efficient and accurate optimization technique, improved Hunger Games Search, to identify unknown parameters in PV systems named IHGS. IHGS makes full use of the population information generated by the differential vectors while incorporating the quantum rotation gate strategy and the Nelder-Mead simplex method (NMs) are fused to further increase the population diversity while rotating the corresponding positions of the search agents, thus efficiently exploring the neighborhood of the optimal solution in the decision space and improving the stability of the algorithm in developing the global optimal solution. The first part of the experiments is to simply verify the effectiveness and the stable merit-seeking ability of the IHGS to handle complex functions by putting the proposed IHGS to test on the IEEE CEC 2017 benchmark test suite. The efficiency of IHGS is verified based on Wilcoxon singed-rank test and Friedman tests. Next, we apply IHGS to three different PV module models (single-diode, double-diode, and PV module) for PV parameter extraction experiments to verify the efficiency and accuracy of IHGS in extracting PV parameters. The root mean square error produced by the IHGS proposed in this study is 9.8602E-04, 9.8248E-04, and 2.4251E-03 for SDM, DDM, and PV modules, respectively. Examples show that IHGS outperforms HGS and other advanced algorithms in terms of convergence speed, data fitting, consistency, and stability. Finally, we perform the PV module parameter extraction problem on three commercial PV models (thin-film ST40, monocrystalline SM55, and multicrystalline KC200GT). We observe that IHGS can still maintain high accuracy when dealing with commercial PV models under complex environments such as different irradiation and temperature. The results show that IHGS is a valuable optimization technique for solar PV parameter estimation based on multi-model prediction.