Tuning of PID controller based on Fruit Fly Optimization Algorithm

The Proportional - Integral - Derivative (PID) controllers are one of the most popular controllers used in industry because of their remarkable effectiveness, simplicity of implementation and broad applicability. PID tuning is the key issue in the design of PID controllers and most of the tuning processes are implemented manually resulting in difficulty and time consuming. To enhance the capabilities of traditional PID parameters tuning techniques, modern heuristics approaches, such as Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), are employed recent years. In this paper, a novel tuning method based on Fruit Fly Optimization Algorithm (FOA) is proposed to optimize PID controller parameters. Each fruit fly´s position represents a candidate solution for PID parameters. When the fruit fly swarm flies towards one location, it is treated as the evolution of each iterative swarm. After hundreds of iteration, the tuning results - the best PID controller parameters can be obtained. The main advantages of the proposed method include ease of implementation, stable convergence characteristic, large searching range, ease of transformation of such concept into program code and ease of understanding. Simulation results demonstrate that the FOA-Based optimized PID (FOA - PID) controller is with the capability of providing satisfactory closed - loop performance.