A Particle Swarm Optimization tuned nonlinear PID controller with improved performance and robustness for First Order Plus Time Delay systems

The Proportional, Integral, and Derivative (PID) controller is a ubiquitous controller within industry. The conventional PID controller can struggle to provide a satisfactory response for the nonlinear systems faced by industry. In addition, conventional PID controllers have a trade-off between performance and robustness, where they cannot compensate for both without compromising stability or speed. In this paper, a novel Nonlinear gains Proportional, Integral, and Derivative (NLPID) control algorithm is proposed as a practical control strategy that shows improvements in the simultaneous set-point tracking and disturbance rejection, to control nonlinear systems. The paper shows the performance and robustness of the proposed controller for the case of a First Order Plus Time Delay (FOPTD) system, which heavily exists in industry. The Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is used to tune the proposed NLPID controller. The performance of the proposed NLPID controller is simulated and compared against established controllers in literature such as conventional PID, two degree of freedom PID, and Smith Predictor PID controllers in MATLAB/Simulink for an FOPTD system, with various uncertainties and disturbances. This study shows that the proposed NLPID controller maintains faster settling and rise time, with no overshoot and excellent disturbance rejection, without compromising stability or speed, and is robust against parametric, additive, and multiplicative uncertainties.