Performance Comparison of Particle Swarm optimization Strategies to Adjust a Nonlinear GAPID Controller

This work presents a performance comparison investigation among six versions of the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm to determine the parameters of the non-linear GAPID (Gaussian Adaptive Proportional, Integral and Derivative) controller, elaborated to control a step-down DC-DC converter. This task comprises eight free coefficients and there is no analytic solution to solve it. Also, the design of the controller is hard to determine due to the existence of several near-optimal solutions with different values for the parameters, which defines this problem as multimodal. In this sense, different optimization strategies can lead to different solutions.