PSO approach to preview tracking control systems

Preview Control is a field well suited for application to systems that have reference signals known a priori. The use of advance knowledge of reference signal can improve the tracking quality of the concerned control system. The classical solution to the Preview Control problem is obtained using the Algebraic Riccati Equation. The solution obtained is good but it is not optimal and has a scope of improvement. This paper presents a novel method of design of H¿ Preview Controller using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) technique. The procedure is based on improving the performance by minimizing the objective function i.e. IAE (Integral of Absolute Error). The procedure is tested for two systems - Altitude Control System of second order and an industrial system of fifth order using MATLAB software environment. The results show that the solutions of PSO based technique are better in terms of the control characteristics of transient response of the system for various preview lengths, stability and also in terms of the objective function Integral of Absolute Error (IAE).