Performance improvement of PID controller for AVR system using Particle Swarm Optimization

A novel time-domain fitness function for determining the parameters of an optimum proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller for an automatic voltage regulator (AVR) system using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) Algorithm approach is presented. An algorithm of employing proposed approach to minimize the maximum percentage overshoot, the rise time, the settling time, and the steady-state error of the terminal voltage of the synchronous generator is presented. From the MATLAB simulation results, it can be settled that the proposed approach has superior features, including fast tuning of PID parameters, stable convergence characteristic, and good computational efficiency. The results obtained from proposed PSO-PID controller are compared with that of estimated by genetic algorithm (GA) and PSO with different fitness functions and is found to have better performance. The outcome of this paper would be a boost to design robust AVR system with improved step-response.