A Comparative Evaluation of GA and PSO Tuned PID Controllers for the Quadruple Tank System

In this research, nature inspired metaheuristic optimization algorithms: Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) Techniques are formulated to tune optimal combinations of PID controller parameters for a quadruple tank level control application. The degree of relation of the best paring for both interacted control loops are justified by using Relative Gain Array (RGA) calculation. The overall system has been modeled and implemented in MATLAB/Simulink and performance evaluations has been done for time domain performance specifications of settling time, rise time, percentage overshoot and steady state error as comparison criterions of controllers. Accordingly, for the minimum phase case, GA tuned PID has settling time of 0.36sec and 0.31second for the tank 1 and tank 2 respectively. And PSO tuned PID controller has settling time of 0.96sec and 0.35sec for tank 1and tank 2 respectively. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of results reveals that there is fast dynamic response using GA PID relative to PSO PID even though the difference is not significant that may be due to stochastic feature of the metahueristic optimization algorithms. In summary, the optimal combination of PID controller algorithms’ parameters can give robust performance compared to PID controller designed using the classical approaches or manual tuning techniques.