Prediction of monthly global solar radiation using adaptive neuro fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) technique over the State of Tamilnadu (India): a comparative study

Enormous potential of solar energy as a clean and pollution free source enrich the global power generation. India, being a tropical country, has high solar radiation and it lies to the north of equator between 8°4′ & 37°6′ North latitude and 68°7′, and 97°5′ East longitude. In southindia, Tamilnadu is located in the extreme south east with an average temperature of gerater than 27.5° (> 81.5 F). In this study, an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) based modelling approach to predict the monthly global solar radiation(MGSR) in Tamilnadu is presented using the real meteorological solar radiation data from the 31 districts of Tamilnadu with different latitude and longitude. The purpose of the study is to compare the accuracy of ANFIS and other soft computing models as found in literature to assess the solar radiation. The performance of the proposed model was tested and compared with other earth region in a case study. The statistical performance parameters such as root mean square error (RMSE), mean bias error (MBE), and coefficient of determination (R2) are presented and compared to validate the performance. The comparative test results prove the ANFIS based prediction are better than other models and furthermore proves its prediction capability for any geographical area with changing meterological conditions.