Determination and Comparison of PID Parameters for Speed Control of DC Motor Using Particle Swarm Optimization and Ziegler-Nichols Method

One of the most important components of every autonomous system is the automatic control system. A lot of research and projects are done on automatic control applications. Since DC Motors are widely used in both autonomous systems and industry, they are chosen as the platform to be controlled in this study. PID controller has been used for DC Motor velocity control and its parameters are determined using two different types of techniques. The first techique is the one that is mentioned widely in automatic control books, namely Ziegler-Nichols (ZN) method, and the second technique is relatively new method of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The performance of the approaches were measured using the sum of absolute errors performance metric. System is tested with various reference types under different types of load and the results are reported. It has been observed that the performance of the PSO approach is higher than the ZN approach in all reference and load types applied in the study. It has been observed that the performance difference has increased even more, especially in complex reference and complex load types, and the results have been reported. In future studies, it is suggested to apply more complex reference and load types and compare the results with the actual system results.