Adaptive simulated annealing for designing finite-precision PID controller structures

Many control applications pose optimisation problems with multimodal and nonsmooth cost functions. Gradient methods are ineffective in these situations. The adaptive simulated annealing (ASA) offers a viable optimisation tool for tackling these difficult constrained optimisation problems. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the ASA using an application, designing finite-precision PID controller structures with maximum stability robustness measure. The sparseness issue of controller structures is also discussed, and it is shown that the ASA can cope with this kind of constraints easily