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Abstract This paper presents the solution to mitigate the total harmonic distortion (THD) in multilevel inverters (MLIs) using novel improved whale optimization algorithm (IWOA). The IWOA falls under the category of swarm-based nature inspired optimization algorithms. It uses a novel diffusion process using a random walk technique and utilizes an additional ranking system to estimate the optimum solution to minimize THD. Moreover, THD minimization is further accomplished through nine various meta-heuristic algorithms for investigation and comparative analysis. The selected algorithms along with the proposed IWOA are rigorously tested on single phase 5 and 7 level cascaded H-Bridge MLIs for various performance parameters such as consistency, computational efficiency and speed of convergence. It is found that the proposed algorithm outperforms the nine algorithms and is efficient for THD minimization for modulation index (MI) in the range of 0–1. The results are analyzed and reported after thorough verification using MATLAB simulation.
Reddy et al. (Mon,) studied this question.