Comparative study of some optimization techniques applied to DC motor control

Traditional tuning techniques for classical Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller suffer from many disadvantages like non-customized performance measure and insufficient process information. For the past two decades nature inspired optimization algorithms are efficiently being implemented for tuning of PID controllers. In this paper, four optimization methods namely Genetic Algorithm (GA), Accelerated Particle Swarm Optimization (APSO), Differential Evolution (DE) and Cuckoo Search (CS) are studied and used to optimize the controller gains of a Proportional-Integral (PI) controller for set point tracking in speed control of a DC motor by minimizing Integral Time Absolute Error (ITAE). Hardware validation of the efficiency of above mentioned optimization algorithms is studied and presented. The plant under study is a DC motor control module (MS15) from M/S LJ CREATE™. M/S National Instruments (NI) based software and hardware components i.e. LabVIEW™ and its add-ons toolkit and data acquisition (DAQ) card has been utilized for the closed loop control in real time. The system identification is done in LabVIEW™ and then offline performance optimization is carried out in MATLAB™. The tuned gains are further used to study the run time performances in LabVIEW™ environment. This is done because MATLAB™ has very good optimization tools and on the other hand LABVIEW™ makes the measurement very easy. From the results obtained it can be clearly inferred that CS algorithm outperformed other algorithms studied in this paper, particularly in disturbance rejection.