Comparison of queen honey bee colony migration with various MPPTs on photovoltaic system under shaded conditions

Shaded conditions cause a decrease in the performance of photovoltaic (PV) systems. In this situation, the power versus voltage curve shows two maximum power points, namely local (LMPP) and global (GMPP). The main challenge for extracting the maximum power from a PV system during shading conditions is the existence of a false maximum or LMPP along with a true maximum or GMPP. Traditional maximum power point tracking (MPPT) has faced hurdles in overcoming the situation. Therefore, this paper describes the implementation of Queen Honey Bee Migration (or QHBM for short) to track GMPP of PV systems, which called QHBM MPPT. The highlight of this paper is the simulation results of QHBM MPPT on PV systems under various shading conditions. We implemented QHBM MPPT on a boost converter installed on a 1200 Wp PV system. We conducted a simulation using MATLAB® with five scenarios which aim to show the various shadows that PV systems might encounter in reality. The MPPT QHBM is tested repeatedly and then the average value is taken to measure performance in MPP tracking. The average value is used to calculate tracking efficiency, number of iteration or convergence time. We also compared QHBM with other methods, namely incremental conductance (IC) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The results obtained show that the QHBM and PSO MPPTs outperform the IC MPPT in terms of efficiency, convergence time and the number of iterations. IC MPPTs oscillate under shading conditions since no knowledge of GMPP. Both PSO and QHBM MPPTs know GMPP from scouts or particles, respectively. Therefore, PSO and QHBM MPPTs are better than IC MPPT in various shading cases