abstract = "Prediction of solar energy availability is an
important part of a number of applications, from
weather and climate modelling, to forecasting power
output of photovoltaic cells. This work proposes and
evaluates the use of evolutionary fuzzy rules,
discovered by genetic programming, for accurate and
inexpensive forecasting of next day available solar
energy, based solely on atmospheric pressure. The use
of only one meteorological variable simplifies the
collection, storage and prediction tasks, making this
approach suitable for a number of hardware-limited
applications. The proposed forecasting system uses a
time series of pressure values for the hours leading up
to the sunrise of the day for which predictions are
made. The pressure values and their differences are
submitted to the evolutionary optimiser that combines
these values into simple fuzzy rules. The resulting
rule set provides predictions that are a substantial
improvement over simple analytical estimates. The
results of pressure-based forecasters also compare
favourably with other simple estimation systems
presented in the literature.",
notes = "Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Univ. of Alberta,
Edmonton, AB, Canada