The main goal of this paper is to provide a framework to accurately estimate the electrical equivalent circuit parameters of photovoltaic arrays by use of an efficient heuristic technique. Owing to the non-linearity of the current vs. voltage (I-V) characteristics of PV modules, using a superior optimization technique helps to effectively find the real electrical parameters. Inspired by the mating process of different bird species, bird mating optimizer (BMO) is a new invented search technique which has shown superior performance for solving complex optimization problems. In this paper, the original BMO algorithm is simplified and used to estimate the electrical parameters of the module model for an amorphous silicon PV system at different operating conditions. The simplified BMO (SBMO) eliminates tedious efforts of parameter setting in original BMO and also modifies some rules. The usefulness of the proposed algorithm is investigated by comparing the obtained results with those found by two particle swarm optimization (PSO) variants, two harmony search (HS) variants as well as seeker optimization algorithm (SOA). Based on the investigated situations of this paper, SBMO yields more accurate results than the other studied methods. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.