A hybrid modified FA-ANFIS-P&O approach for MPPT in photovoltaic systems under PSCs

ABSTRACT A modified firefly algorithm (MFO)-based adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) combined with the perturbation and observation (P&O) is used in this paper to track the maximum power point (MPP) in photovoltaic systems (PVs). The proposed method identifies and tracks the MPP in two stages. First, according to the irradiance on the solar panels, the ANFIS approximately identifies the MPP. In the second stage, the P&O method starts to act in the tracking cycle and initiates an accurate searching process from that point. The suggested hybrid method covers the problems of commonly-used methods, such as inability in detecting the global MPP under partial shading conditions (PSCs) and trapping in the local optima. Furthermore, the method provides significantly higher speed for the MPP tracking under various irradiance patterns. To prove the above-mentioned claims, the given approach is compared with the P&O method as a common method in the MPPT and particle swarm optimisation (PSO) which operates based on swarm intelligence. Simulation results obtained from MATLAB/Simulink environment show that the proposed method identifies and tracks the MPP under uniform irradiance and PSCs in a very short time of roughly 0.2 s.