Supervised machine learning-based salp swarm algorithm for fault diagnosis of photovoltaic systems

Abstract The diagnosis of faults in grid-connected photovoltaic (GCPV) systems is a challenging task due to their complex nature and the high similarity between faults. To address this issue, we propose a wrapper approach called the salp swarm algorithm (SSA) for feature selection. The main objective of SSA is to extract only the most important features from the raw data and eliminate unnecessary ones to improve the classification accuracy of supervised machine learning (SML) classifiers. Subsequently, the selected features are used to train supervised machine learning (SML) techniques in distinguishing between various operating modes. To evaluate the efficiency of the technique, we used healthy and faulty data from GCPV systems that have been injected with frequent faults, 20 different types of faults were introduced, including line-to-line, line-to-ground, connectivity faults, and those affecting the operation of bay-pass diodes. These faults present diverse conditions, such as simple and multiple faults in the PV arrays and mixed faults in both arrays. The performances of the developed SSA-SML are compared with those using principal component analysis (PCA) and kernel PCA (KPCA) based SML techniques through different criteria (i.e., accuracy, recall, precision, F1 score, and computation time). The experimental findings demonstrated that the proposed diagnosis paradigm outperformed the other techniques and achieved a high diagnostic accuracy (an average accuracy greater than 99%) while significantly reducing computation time.