Design of a fractional order PID controller for an AVR using particle swarm optimization

Application of fractional order PID (FOPID) controller to an automatic voltage regulator (AVR) is presented and studied in this paper. An FOPID is a PID whose derivative and integral orders are fractional numbers rather than integers. Design stage of such a controller consists of determining five parameters. This paper employs particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to carry out the aforementioned design procedure. PSO is an advanced search procedure that has proved to have very high efficiency. A novel cost function is defined to facilitate the control strategy over both the time-domain and the frequency-domain specifications. Comparisons are made with a PID controller and it is shown that the proposed FOPID controller can highly improve the system robustness with respect to model uncertainties.