Moment of inertia of a DC motor as significant factor on the performance of PSO algorithm utilizing WTRI based fitness function

The implementation of PSO algorithm in optimizing PID controller's parameters has been in active research area recently. One of the popular plant to be controlled using this control strategy is a DC motor and various types of DC motors with variations in parameters value have been used in this research area. Moment of inertia is one of the important parameters of a DC motor which can affect the output transient response including rise time, settling time, overshoot and steady state error. This paper investigate the moment of inertia as a significant factor on the performance of PSO algorithm utilizing the weighted transient response index (WTRI) based fitness function. Some popular weight combinations of WTRI were used in the experiment with 3 DC motors with the same specifications except for the moment of inertia. The experimental result concluded the existence of some kind of threshold moment of inertia where the performance of PSO algorithm was not affected by any variation of weight combinations in WTRI based fitness function if the moment of inertia of the DC motor is less than the threshold value. With moment of inertia above this threshold value, the significant variation in the performance of PSO algorithm with different weight combinations in WTRI based fitness function can be seen.