Search for Global Maxima in Multimodal Functions by Applying Numerical Optimization Algorithms: A Comparison between Golden Section and Simulated Annealing

In the field of engineering when a situation is not resolved analytically, efforts are made to develop methods that approximate a possible solution. These efforts have originated the numerical methods known at present, which allow formulating mathematical problems that can be solved using logical and arithmetic operations. This paper presents a comparison between the numerical optimization algorithms golden section search and simulated annealing, which are tested in four different scenarios. These scenarios are functions implemented with a feedforward neural network, which emulate a partial shading behavior in photovoltaic modules with local and global maxima. The presence of the local maxima makes it difficult to track the maximum power point, necessary to obtain the highest possible performance of the photovoltaic module. The programming of the algorithms was performed in C language. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithms to find global maxima. However, the golden section search method showed a better performance in terms of percentage of error, computation time and number of iterations, except in test scenario number three, where a better percentage of error was obtained with the simulated annealing algorithm for a computational temperature of 1000.