Abstract

Annual global energy consumption growth is around 1.3% with forecasts until 2040. Photovoltaic systems became a suitable alternative to nuclear and fossil energy generation. In order to support this technology's dissemination, we develop and evaluate an automated formal synthesis approach that assists in decision-making for off-grid systems. Our proposed approach, called PVz, is based on a variant of the counterexample-guided inductive synthesis; it has a multi-core feature, which can obtain the optimal sizing of photovoltaic systems focusing on Life Cycle Cost analysis. Given the electrical needs of a home, we seek a set of electrical equipment with the best possible combination of devices that meet the specified requirements. We calculate all costs related to maintenance over 20 years. The results presented are based on seven case studies; some of them are real ones from the Amazon region in Brazil. The same case studies were solved by a commercial optimization tool. Our technique and the commercial tool results were validated with popular simulation software to perform a fair comparison. Furthermore, we analyze some topics such as run-time, optimal solution, and configuration of the resulting systems. We claim that our technique is advantageous compared to the existing approaches in the literature.