Development of a PI controller through an ant colony optimization algorithm applied to a SMAR® didactic level plant

摘要

This work is the development of a method to solve an optimization problem applied to tuning the PI controllers parameters since traditional methods do not often find desired expectations. The search for solutions to this problem requires the discovery of new efficient algorithms able to find acceptable answers and, naturally, better than those obtained by traditional methods, which do not guarantee that it is the best one. This approach is based on an essential computational model used in optimization problems: the Ant Colony Optimization, which is based on the strategy used by ants in search of food. The procedure investigates the potentiality of this optimization method, using it to tuning PI controllers. The evaluation of this method is a result of a didactic plant level control application, and the results are presented in this work, where it was compared to classical PI controller tuning method. As expected, the PI tuning from Ant Colony Optimization performed better results than the other ones.