Investigation of fractional control performance for magnetic levitation experimental set-up

Magnetic levitation (Maglev) is a typical benchmark problem in control engineering which falls in the class of unstable systems. Fractional calculus based control is a recently emerged research area which investigates superior performance of fractional controllers over existing integer order controllers. This paper presents application of fractional control for Maglev experimental set-up to test its possible betterness. The controller is tuned for minimizing various performance indices such as IAE, ISE, ITAE, and MCE. The results with the designed controller are discussed in detail for the simulated and real plant cases.