LAUSR

Purpose For decades, continuous research work is going on to maximize the power harvested from the sun; however, there is only a limited analysis on exploiting the microwatt output power from indoor lightings. Microelectronic system has power demand in the µW range, and therefore, indoor photovoltaics would be appropriate for micro-energy harvesting appliances. “Energy harvesting is defined as the transfer process by which energy source is acquired from the ambient energy, stored in energy storage element and powered to the target systems”. The theory of energy harvesting is: gathering energy from surroundings and offering technological solutions such as solar energy harvesting, wind energy collection and vibration energy harvesting. “The solar cell or photovoltaic cell (PV), is a device that converts light into electric current using the photoelectric effect”. Factors such as light source, temperature, circuit connection, light intensity, angle and height can manipulate the functions of PV cells. Among these, the most noticeable factor is the light intensity that has a major impact on the operations of solar panels. Design/methodology/approach This paper aims to design an enhanced prediction model on illuminance or irradiance by an optimized artificial neural network (ANN). The input attributes or the features considered here are temperatures, maxim, TSL, VI, short circuit current, open-circuit voltage, maximum power point (MPP) voltage, MPP current and MPP power, respectively. To enhance the performance of the prediction model, the weights of ANN are optimally tuned by a new self-improved brain storm optimization (SI-BSO) model. Findings The superiority of the implemented work is compared and proved over the conventional models in terms of error analysis and prediction analysis. Accordingly, the presented approach was analysed and its superiority was proved over other conventional schemes such as ANN, ANN-Levenberg–Marquardt (LM), adaptive-network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) and brainstorm optimization (BSO). In addition, analysis was held with respect to error measures such as mean absolute relative error (MARE), mean square root error (MSRE), mean absolute error and mean absolute percentage error. Moreover, prediction analysis was also performed that revealed the betterment of the presented model. More particularly, the proposed ANN + SI-BSO model has attained minimal error for all measures when compared to the existing schemes. More particularly, on considering the MARE, the adopted model for data set 1 was 23.61%, 48.12%, 79.39% and 90.86% better than ANN, ANN-LM, ANFIS and BSO models, respectively. Similarly, on considering data set 2, the MSRE of the implemented model was 99.87%, 70.69%, 99.57% and 94.74% better than ANN, ANN-LM, ANFIS and BSO models, respectively. Thus, the enhancement of the presented ANN + SI-BSO scheme has been validated effectively. Originality/value This work has established an improved illuminance/irradiance prediction model using the optimization concept. Here, the attributes, namely, temperature, maxim, TSL, VI, Isc, Voc, Vmpp, Impp and Pmpp were given as input to ANN, in which the weights were chosen optimally. For the optimal selection of weights, a novel ANN + SI-BSO model was established, which was an improved version of the BSO model.