Designing a controller via Simulated Annealing

With Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controllers being widely used in industry for optimum solutions. Optimization of the PID controller is an important problem in Control Engineering. Therefore, in this paper work we have implemented Simulated Annealing to tune the controller parameters. Optimizing the controller parameters on the basis of the Simulated Annealing algorithm, based on criteria defined using an objective function, allows us to find optimal solutions for the controller parameters that give us minimum error. In terms of performance, the PID controller designed with Simulated Annealing gives us great results with regard to the rise time, settling time, overshoot and steady-state error. Simulated Annealing (SA) is a meta-heuristic method which is used to find solutions in a large search space. It is inspired by a physical process, specifically based on annealing in metallurgy. In annealing the slow cooling of the material increases the size of its crystals and thus reduces defects. SA is dependent on internal thermodynamic energy. When it is implemented for the PID controller problem the algorithm searches for the minimal energy, respectively the minimal error. The case study of tuning the PID for the Mechatronics system verifies that this method can be used for this purpose and great performance of the system can be achieved.