Abstract: The uniformity of illumination is the main problem in the solar simulator system. At present, theoretical calculation has been used to design a lamp array which has uniform illumination; however, this method is too complicated to execute. Aiming at the deficiency，the numerical optimization method was applied to design the halogen lamp arrays in this paper. Different from the single optimization method, the simulated annealing (SA) algorithm and particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) algorithm were combined to optimize the lamp arrays, breaking through the limitation of single optimization method and achieving better result . By programming to optimize the coordinates of each lamp array, the optimal results were put into the illumination optical simulation software for analysis.The experimental data show that the uniformity of 3 kinds of lamp array are 91%, 87% and 91%,respectively; under the same conditions the uniformity of hexagonal lamp array is better than that of circular lamp array; and the experimental method is simple and feasible by utilizing the optimization method.