Design and comparative performance analysis of PID controlled automatic voltage regulator tuned by many optimizing liaisons

This paper deals with the design of Proportional, Integral, and Derivative (PID) controller to an Automatic Voltage Regulator (AVR) tuned by recently developed Simplified Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm so called, Many Optimizing Liaisons (MOL) algorithm. MOL simplifies the original PSO by randomly choosing the particle to update, instead of iterating over the entire swarm thus eliminating the particle´s best known position and making it easier to tune the behavioural parameters. The proposed method is compared with the earlier used PSO algorithm. For performance studies; Transient response analysis, Bode plot analysis and Root locus analysis are explained in details. The robustness analysis is done by varying the time constants of amplifier, exciter, generator & sensor in the range of -50% to + 50% with a step size of 25% respectively. The results of these analyses using the MOL algorithm are found to be better with respect to the analysis of the PID controller using PSO algorithm.