An evolutionary computing approach for estimating global solar radiation

This paper presents a non-linear regression model based on an evolutionary computing technique namely the genetic programming for estimating solar radiation. This approach aims to estimate the best formula that represents the function for estimating the global solar radiation on horizontals with respect to the measured climatological data. First, we present a reference approach to find one global formula that models the relation among the solar radiation amount and a set of weather factors. In the second step, we present an enhanced approach that consists of multi formulas of regression in a parallel structure. The performance of the proposed approaches has been evaluated using statistical analysis measures. The obtained results were promising and comparable to those obtained by other empirical and neural models conducted by other research groups.