Reconfiguration of photovoltaic arrays based on genetic algorithm

Abstract

This paper describes a Genetic Algorithm (GA) implementation devoted to the calculation of reconfiguration patterns for Photovoltaic Arrays (PVs). The proposed solution is compared to the classical Brute Force (BF) approach, whose use is very restrictive, because of its quite poor performance. The GA tuning up process is briefly described, and several cases of study, including partial shading profiles for the PV array, are presented. Results show a very superior performance of the GA, when compared to the BF approach. Improvements in output power, as a result of the calculated reconfiguration, are also shown.

Keywords

• genetic algorithm
• online optimization
• reconfiguration of PV systems