A Comparative Performance Assessment of Evolutionary Fractional Order PID Controllers for Magnetic Levitation Plant with Time Delay

Fractional Order controllers have been extensively applied to various fields of science and engineering, since several decades, because of the ability to control more parameters and consequent better control. However, to achieve this advantage, proper tuning of the associated parameters plays an important role. To achieve this objective, this paper employs a multi-agent symbiotic organisms search (MASOS) algorithm for appropriately tuning the parameters of fractional order proportional-integral-derivative (FOPID) controller for stabilizing a magnetic levitation plant (MLP) with time delay. Three different FOPID controllers have been precisely tuned and their performance has been evaluated and compared in this paper. The results demonstrate that the I-PD configuration produces the best performance in terms of time domain as well as frequency domain specifications, when compared with the other configurations.