Knowledge-based particle swarm optimization for PID controller tuning

A proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller is a control loop feedback mechanism widely employed in industrial control systems. The parameters tuning is a sticking point, having a great effect on the control performance of a PID system. There is no perfect rule for designing controllers, and finding an initial good guess for the parameters of a well-performing controller is difficult. In this paper, we develop a knowledge-based particle swarm optimization by incorporating the dynamic response information of PID into the optimizer. Prior knowledge not only empowers the particle swarm optimization algorithm to quickly identify the promising regions, but also helps the proposed algorithm to increase the solution precision in the limited running time. To benchmark the performance of the proposed algorithm, an electric pump drive and an automatic voltage regulator system are selected from industrial applications. The simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm with a newly proposed performance index has a significant performance on both test cases and outperforms other algorithms in terms of overshoot, steady state error, and settling time.