A Comparative Study among Different Algorithms Investigating Optimum Design of PID Controller in Automatic Voltage Regulator

Proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller is the most widely applicable controller in industrial control applications. Tuning of PID controller parameters manually requires experience in control tuning and may lead to inaccurate and poor performance. This paper explains in details how to employ whale optimization algorithm (WOA) and water cycle algorithm (WCA) to obtain the optimum PID controller parameters of an automatic voltage regulator (AVR) to enhance the terminal voltage of a synchronous generator. The saturation effect on AVR control system is taken into account in system simulation in order to represent a realistic AVR control system. A comparison is performed between these proposed algorithms and the genetic algorithm (GA) showing that the WCA offers a more satisfactory performance and faster convergence compared to the WOA, and GA.