The abundance and non-polluting nature of solar energy has aroused the interest of many researchers. This worldwide attention of photovoltaic panels has led to the need of generating accurate model for solar photovoltaic (PV) module before proceeding to the installation part. However, accurate modeling of solar PV characteristics is difficult; since the manufacturer's datasheet provides only four values such as V-mp, I-mp, V-oc, and I-sc. Further, for accurate modeling precise estimation of model parameters at different environmental conditions are very essential. On the other hand, optimization technique is a very powerful tool to obtain solutions to complex non-linear problems. Hence, in this paper, Bacterial Foraging Algorithm is proposed to model the solar PV characteristics accurately. A new equation has been evolved to determine the values of V-oc, V-mp accurately; since these values decides the closeness of the simulated characteristics. Model parameters are extracted for three different types of solar PV panels. A systematic evaluation and performance comparison of Bacterial Foraging Algorithm with other optimization techniques such as Genetic Algorithm and Artificial Immune System has been done and the best computational technique is derived based on performance criteria such as accuracy, consistency, speed of convergence and absolute error. Extensive computations are carried out for the proposed method, as well as for Genetic Algorithm and Artificial Immune System to substantiate the findings. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.