Comparison of Differential Evolution and Particle Swarm Optimization for the optimization of a PI cascade control

PI cascade controllers are often used in control applications due to their simplicity. Because of uncertain and varying system parameters, a robust control is needed. However, known methods to generate robust controllers often lead to complicated control structures. Unfortunately, there are no analytical solutions to generate robust controllers with a fixed simple structure like the PI cascade. Therefore, easy-to-use optimization algorithms are needed. In this paper it is shown that for a practical approach using recommended parameter settings from literature both Differential Evolution and Particle Swarm Optimization can be used for the optimization of a PI cascade control. A performance comparison shows similar results, so both of them are useful to field engineers who apply optimization algorithms to real-world problems and are often inexperienced concerning optimization.