Inverter Harmonic Elimination Through a Colony of Continuously Exploring Ants

In this paper, the authors have developed a novel algorithm for selective harmonic elimination in a pulsewidth-modulated inverter based on the foraging behavior of a colony of ants. The problem of selective harmonic elimination, together with output voltage regulation, is redrafted as an optimization problem, and the solution is sought through the novel concept. The proposed scheme has several advantages, such as computational simplicity, derivative-free operation, and guaranteed near-optimal convergence with random initial guess. It is shown that a newly introduced parameter in the algorithm- quantum of the step movement of ants- largely influences the speed of convergence of the algorithm. Theoretical and practical results are included. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm is compared with the conventional Newton-Raphson method and genetic algorithm, and conclusions are presented.