IntroductionMaximization of photovoltaic energy extraction in solar-powered electric vehicles (EVs) has become a key priority for improving system efficiency and autonomy.MethodsThis paper presents an Improved Tunicate Swarm Algorithm (ITSA)-based MPPT strategy interfaced with an Enhanced Cascaded Converter (ECC) for Switched Reluctance Motor (SRM) drives. The proposed ITSA integrates Lévy flight-based global exploration to avoid local optima and improve convergence speed under dynamic irradianc