Design of PID controller for automatic voltage regulator system using Ant Lion Optimizer

Purpose Now days, various techniques are used for controlling the plants. New ideas are evolving day by day to get better-quality control for various industrial processes to produce high-quality products. Currently, the focus of this research is being emphasized on application of nature-inspired algorithms in control systems. The purpose of this paper is to apply a nature-inspired algorithm called Ant Lion Optimizer (ALO) for the design of proportional-integrator-derivative (PID) controller for an automatic voltage regulator (AVR) system. Design/methodology/approach For the design of the PID controller, the ALO algorithm is considered as a designing tool for obtaining the optimal values of the controller parameter. All the simulations are carried out in Simulink/MATLAB environment. A comparative study is carried out with some modern nature-inspired algorithm to describe the advantages of this tuning method. Findings The proposed method has superiority value in transient and frequency domain analysis than the other published heuristic optimization algorithms. The presented approach has almost no variation in transient response when varying time constants of the system parameter, such as exciter, generator, amplifier and sensor from -50 per cent to +50 per cent. In addition, the close loop system is robust against any disturbances such as input-output disturbances and parametric uncertainty, as the sensitivity values are nearly equal to one. Originality/value The proposed method presents the design and performance analysis of proportional integral derivate (PID) controller for an AVR system using the recently proposed ALO.