Fractional Order PID Control using Ant Colony Optimization

An Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) based Fractional Fuzzy PID controller is proposed in this paper. The resulting controller Ant Colony Fractional Fuzzy PID (AFrFPID) Controller incorporates the characteristics of the Ant Colony System and Fuzzy Control for controlling integer and fractional order plants. Fractional Order PID (FOPID) controllers show better performance for systems that have non-linear and time varying variables. However; the complexity of designing FOPID parameters is increased due to increase in tuning parameters (from 3 to 5). To obtain an initial estimate of these five parameters; the bio-inspired ACO algorithm is used. Ant Colony Optimization is a population based meta-heuristic technique which from the behavior of real ant colonies to find solutions to discrete optimization problems. Fuzzy Control is used to further fine tune the parameters for better control. MATLAB Simulations are presented and the performance of the AFrFPID controller is validated.