Design of an artificial neural network and proportional-integral-derivative controller using particle swarm optimization for Boeing 747-400 aircraft pitch control

This paper presents the design of an artificial neural network (ANN) and proportional integral derivative (PID) controller using particle swarm optimization (PSO) for Boeing 747-400 aircraft pitch control (APC). The combinations of disturbance, open loop unstable and nonlinear dynamics are major problems in a Boeing 747-400 commercial aircraft. This paper investigates the control mechanism of pitch angle control of Boeing 747-400 with small disturbance theory linearization methods and ANN based non-linear controllers. A PID controller is tuned by PSO, whereas the PID is tuned by graphical user interface (GUI) when compared with an ANN controller. The controller for this system was designed using an ANN controller and PID tuned using a recent optimization technique such as the PSO method with integral square error (ISE) as an objective function. A comparative study of the time domain performances of the pitch control of the Boeing 747-400 commercial aircraft was presented. The ANN controller outperformed the PID-PSO and PID-GUI controllers in terms of system performance, including rising time (tr), settling time (ts), percentage overshoot (percent OS), and steady state error, across various elevator deflection angles. Basically, the percentage overshoot and steady state error were 0% and 0 respectively, indicating that the ANN controller achieved an improvement of 100%. Various parameters were compared with the PID-GUI, PID-PSO, and ANN controllers for pitch control of the Boeing 747-400 air craft. The ANN controller architecture comprises of two input neurons, two hidden layer neurons, and one output layer neuron. The simulation was performed using Matlab/Simulink. The results show that the PID-PSO controller was improved by the ANN controller and the performance specifications of the aircraft obtained by the ANN controller were satisfactory. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.