Application of Lévy flight particle swarm optimisation in MPPT of photovoltaic system

Abstract

ABSTRACT Due to the intermittent and unstable nature of PV systems, maximum power point tracking (MPPT) of PV systems is necessary in practice. At the same time, PV cells are also shaded by objects such as trees and houses in the environment causing local shadows, so the Lévy flight particle swarm optimisation (LFPSO) is proposed in this paper. The random walk process of Lévy flight is added to the particle swarm optimisation (PSO) to increase the diversity of the search, which can avoid falling into local optimal solutions. The experimental simulation results show that the algorithm proposed in this paper can still accurately track the global maximum power in the case of partial shading, which well avoids falling into the local maximum power. The performance is much higher than the traditional maximum power point tracking algorithm, which improves the efficiency of the PV system.