New technique for global solar radiation forecasting using simulated annealing and genetic algorithms

Measurement of solar irradiance is difficult because of high instrument cost, limited spatial coverage and limited length of record. Therefore, theoretical models are being used for the estimation of global solar irradiance. In this paper, a novel approach based on simulated annealing algorithm as a meta-heuristic method is implemented in MATLAB software to estimate the monthly average daily global solar radiation on a horizontal surface for six different climate cities of Iran. A search method based on genetic algorithm is applied to accelerate problem solving. Results show that simulated annealing based on genetic algorithm search is a suitable method to find the global solar radiation.

Keywords:

Simulated annealing , Global solar radiation , Experimental coefficients , Statistical regression techniques , Intelligent techniques