The operation and performance of a photovoltaic system (PV) are affected by some factors such as; solar radiation, ambient temperature, PV array configuration and shadow which may be either completely or partially. The partially shadow is caused by clouds, trees due to wind, neighboring buildings and utilities. The shadow effect causes the multiple local maximum power points in the PV module voltage-power characteristics and only one Global Maximum Power Point (GMPP); additionally the shadowing causes high power loss in the shaded cells and produces hot spot. In this paper a new optimization approach based on proposed Modified Artificial Bee Colony (MABC) algorithm is used to solve a proposed constrained objective function of PV module power loss and mitigate the shading effect. The proposed MABC is compared with GA, PSO and ABC. The obtained results proved that the MABC is the most efficient algorithm in solving the objective function that mitigating the power loss in the PV module under partially shading effect. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.