Solar cells are one of the renewable energy sources that have been widely used. The parameters extraction plays an important role in the speed and accuracy of models designed for photovoltaic (PV) solar cells and modules. In recent years, the evolutionary algorithm (EA), swarm intelligence (SI), and other nature-inspired (NI) algorithms have been widely used for the parameters extraction of PV modules. This paper presents a new method by improving the existing R-cr-IJADE with an onlooker ranking -based mutation scheme. This mutation scheme is an effective and efficient vectors selection mechanism for encountering the objective function containing a flat basin. The improved algorithm referred to as ORcr-IJADE, it is quickly and accurately extracted the parameters of solar cell models. 18 solar cell models and PV modules from several manufacturers were used to validate the algorithm. Comparative studies among the different algorithms were conducted using current-voltage (I-V) data. The results of ORcr-IJADE were compared with 31 state-of-the-art EA, SI, and NI algorithms. The results confirm the superiority of the proposed method, as the accuracy, the success rate and the convergence speed are better than the competitors. The proposed algorithm is useful in developing highly accurate solar PV models with less computational effort used. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.