Calculation of robust and optimal fractional PID controllers for time delay systems with gain margin and phase margin specifications

This paper proposes a novel method to graphically compute all feasible gain and phase margin specifications-oriented robust and optimal fractional PID controllers to stabilize time delay processes (TD) of any order. The gain-phase margin tester method is utilized to guarantee the concerned systems certain robust safety margins and test the constant gain margin boundary, constant phase margin boundary, and stability boundary in the parameter plane. The overlapping region of these plotted boundaries, which represents all feasible robust stabilizing PID controllers and allows the considered TD processes to retain pre-specified safety margins, is graphically determined as the gain and phase margin specifications-oriented region (GPMSOR). The variations of the GPMSOR and the stability region with respect to the variations of the noninteger orders of the integral and derivative terms have been investigated. According this, it is possible to slightly enlarge the GPMSOR by altering the noninterger order of the integral and derivative terms. This modifications in GPMSOR through altering the noninteger orders of the integral and derivative terms allows us to find the robust and optimal PID controller gain set for the considered TD systems. In other words, the selected fractional order PID controllers from the GPMSOR not only retain the prescribed GM and PM specifications but minimize the integral of the absolute error (IAE) or the integral of the squared error (ISE) performance criterion. Finally, an illustrative example cited from the literature with computer simulations is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and confirm the validity of the proposed methodology.