A heuristic particle swarm optimization combined with Back Propagation Neural Network (BPNN-PSO) technique is proposed in this paper to improve the convergence and the accuracy of prediction for fault diagnosis of Photovoltaic (PV) array system. This technique works by applying the ability of deep learning for classification and prediction combined with the particle swarm optimization ability to find the best solution in the search space. Some parameters are extracted from the output of the PV array to be used for identification purpose for the fault diagnosis of the system. The results using the back propagation neural network method only and the method of the back propagation heuristic combination technique are compared. The back propagation algorithm converges after 350 steps while the proposed BP-PSO algorithm converges only after 250 steps in the training phase. The accuracy of prediction using the BP algorithms is about 87.8% while the proposed BP-PSO algorithm achieved 95% of right predictions. It was clearly shown that the results of the back propagation heuristic combination technique had better results in the convergence of the simulation as well as in the accuracy of the prediction of the fault diagnosis in the PV system.

New trends were introduced in using PhotoVoltaic (PV) energy which are mostly attributable to new laws internationally having a goal to decrease the usage of fossil fuels. The PV systems efficiency is impacted significantly by environmental factors and different faults occurrence. These faults if they were not rapidly identified and fixed may cause dangerous consequences. A lot of methods have been introduced in the literature to detect faults that may occur in a PV system such as using Current-Voltage (I-V) curve measurements, atmospheric models and statistical methods. In this paper, various machine learning techniques in particular supervised learning techniques are used for PV array failure diagnosis. The main target is the identification and categorization of several faults that may occur such as shadowing, degradation, open circuit and short circuit faults that have a great impact on PV systems performance. The results showed the technique’s high ability of fault diagnosis capability. The K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) technique showed the best fault prediction performance. It achieves prediction accuracy of 99.2% and 99.7% Area Under Curve-Receiver Operating Curve (AUC-ROC) score. This shows its superiority in fault prediction in PV systems over other used methods Decision Tree, Naïve Bayes, and Logistic Regression.

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