  Thin-film solar cells are predominately designed similar to a stacked
structure. Optimizing the layer thicknesses in this stack structure is crucial
to extract the best efficiency of the solar cell. The commonplace method used
in optimization simulations, such as for optimizing the optical spacer layers'
thicknesses, is the parameter sweep. Our simulation study shows that the
implementation of a meta-heuristic method like the genetic algorithm results in
a significantly faster and accurate search method when compared to the
brute-force parameter sweep method in both single and multi-layer optimization.
While other sweep methods can also outperform the brute-force method, they do
not consistently exhibit $100\%$ accuracy in the optimized results like our
genetic algorithm. We have used a well-studied P3HT-based structure to test our
algorithm. Our best-case scenario was observed to use $60.84\%$ fewer
simulations than the brute-force method.
