Optimizing solar irradiance forecasting: ANN models enhanced with ADAM and Cuckoo search algorithm

Renewable energy sources (RES) are being used and integrated into the electrical grid as a result of the environment’s effects and the ever-increasing demand for energy. Reliable and accurate forecasts are necessary to address environmental concerns and improve grid management due to the intermittent availability of renewable energy sources. This study focuses on improving ANN-based techniques for precise solar irradiance prediction as the prediction accuracy of an artificial neural network (ANN) is impacted by the random assignment of weights to its edges. As a result, we proposed hybrid solar irradiance forecasting models in which the cuckoo search algorithm (CSA) and adaptive moment estimation (ADAM) are used to optimize the weights assigned to the ANN’s edges. Two models were presented in this study namely: ADAM-optimized ANN model and a novel two-stage optimization technique known as CSA-ADAM optimized ANN model for accurate and reliable forecasting of solar irradiance. Both models were tested using actual weather data, and standard error metrics like mean squared error (MSE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), mean absolute error (MAE), and root mean square error (RMSE) to assess their accuracy. The outcomes demonstrate that ADAM-optimized ANN model produced MSE = 0.52, MAPE = 0.18%, MAE = 0.64, and RMSE = 0.72, and CSA-ADAM optimized ANN model obtained MSE = 0.25, MAPE = 0.17%, MAE = 0.43, and RMSE = 0.50. We evaluated the practicality of both models by comparing their average prediction times using the same test dataset. While the ADAM-optimized ANN model took an average of 0.1093 ± 0.0085 seconds to make predictions on the test data, the CSA-ADAM optimized ANN model took 0.1110 ± 0.0058 seconds. These findings demonstrate that using CSA to optimize the ANN weights increases the accuracy of solar irradiance predictions.