A comparison of bio-inspired optimization methodologies applied to the tuning of industrial controllers

A comparison of different bio-inspired methods is presented for the problem of tuning the parameters of a PID industrial controller for second order plus time delay plants. The compared algorithms are representative of three different kind of methodologies (evolutionary, swarm-based and ecology-based). Al methods are briefly explained and are fully implemented to solve the control problem at hand. It was found that all methods are well suited to solve the problem, but they differ in its computational cost. However in all cases, the different methodologies tested were able to find similar minimum values for different families of plants.