Parameter extraction of solar cell models plays an important role in the simulation and design calculation of photovoltaic (PV) systems. In this paper, in order to fast and accurately extract the solar cell parameters, an improved adaptive differential evolution with crossover rate repairing technique and ranking-based mutation is proposed. The proposed method is referred to as R-cr-IJADE, which is an improved version of JADE. In R-cr-IJADE, including the parameter adaptation presented in JADE, the crossover rate repairing technique and the ranking-based mutation are also synergized to improve the performance of JADE when solving the parameter extraction problems of solar cell models. In order to verify the performance of R-cr-IJADE, it is used to extract the parameters of different solar cell models, i.e., single diode, double diode, and PV module. Compared with other parameter extraction techniques, experimental results indicate the superiority of R-cr-IJADE in terms of the quality of final solutions, success rate, and convergence speed. In addition, the simulated data with the extracted parameters of R-cr-IJADE are in very good agreement with the experimental data in all cases. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.