Optimal Design of Fractional Order PIλDµ Controller for an AVR System Using Ant Lion Optimizer

Abstract

Application of fractional order PID (FOPID) controller to an automatic voltage regulator (AVR) is presented and studied in this paper. Fractional-order PIλDµ controller is a generalization of standard PID controller using fractional calculus. Compared to PID controller, the tuning of FOPID is more complex and remains a challenging problem. Indeed, design stage of such a controller consists of determining eleven parameters. This paper proposes a novel population based optimization algorithm called Ant Lion Optimizer algorithm (ALO) for solving the FOPID controller tuning problem. ALO has proved to have very high efficiency. Comparisons are made with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Genetic Algorithm (GA), Cultural algorithms (CAs) and multi-objective evolutionary optimizers (MOEO) techniques and it is shown that the proposed FOPID controller can highly improve the system robustness.