2010 IEEE/ASME International Conference on

Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics

Montral, Canada, July 6-9, 2010

Optimal Tuning of PID Controllers Using Artificial Bee Colony

Algorithm
Mahdi Abachizadeh, Mohammad Reza Haeri Yazdi and Aghil Yousefi-Koma
School of Mechanical Engineering
University of Tehran
Tehran, Iran
abachizadeh@ut.ac.ir, myazdi@ut.ac.ir, aykoma@ut.ac.ir
Evolutionary programming (EP) algorithm was employed by
Chang and Yan [8] who compared their method for a fourth
order system with delay with many other tuning approaches.
Similarly, Bagis [9] used modified genetic algorithm to find
the optimum PID parameters and compared the results with
fuzzy and classic methods.
Bee-based algorithms are novel methods in engineering
optimization and there are few works in the field of control
and electrical engineering. In this paper, Artificial Bee
Colony (ABC) algorithm is employed to optimize simulation
benchmarks presented in [8-9]. Comprehensive evaluations
reported in these two papers by means of several methods
make it possible to assess the efficiency of this algorithm.

Abstract In this paper, an efficient method based on

Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) metaheuristic is implemented for
tuning PID controllers. Considering performance indices
presented in the literature, benchmark plants of different
orders and time delays are controlled by PID controllers with
optimum gains. Results clearly demonstrate that the employed
method has outperformed other techniques such as fuzzy
modeling and genetic algorithm resulting in designs with
minimum error, overshoot and settling time.
Keywords - pid tuning; Artificial Bee Colony algorithm; error
minimization

I.

INTRODUCTION

II.

In the presence of modern controllers, proportionalintegral-derivative (PID) controllers are still widely used in
many industrial processes. This is mainly because PID
controllers are simple in architecture and are easily tuned. In
addition, they have shown robust, reliable, efficient and costeffective performance for most applications.
To implement these controllers, three parameters which
are the proportional, integral and derivative gains should be
tuned to provide stable response as well as minimum error
while tracking the input.
The tuning methods of Ziegler-Nichols (Z-N) [1] and
Cohen-Coon (C-C) [2] are two classic approaches which
have been used for years especially when no or little
information about the plant under control is provided. They
grant stable and robust systems but the gains are never
guaranteed for being optimal. Also, the conventional tuning
methods sometimes fail to achieve satisfactory performance
when the plants are nonlinear, of high order or have time
delay. Hence, other approaches have been introduced to
enhance the preliminary tuning obtained by classic ones.
Fuzzy techniques besides optimization approaches and
neural networks as well as hybrid methods are the main tools
which have been proposed in the last two decades.
Ghoshal Optimized PID gains using Particle swarm
optimization in a fuzzy environment [3]. Also, Zhao et al.
proposed a fuzzy rule-based scheme for gain scheduling of
PID controllers [4]. Visioli presented another study using
fuzzy logic based set-point weighting [5]. Using neural
networks, Wu et al. tuned PID controllers by means of fuzzy
parameters [6]. GA based multi-objective PID control of a
linear brushless DC motor was performed by Lin et al. [7].

978-1-4244-8030-2/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE

OVERVIEW OF PID CONTROLLERS

A PID controller is a combination of a proportional, an

integral and a derivative controller, integrating the main
features of all three. Fig. 1 demonstrates a simplified block
diagram of a plant controlled by a PID. The output of a PID
controller, which is the processed error signal, can be
presented as:
t

u (t )

K p e(t )  K i e(t )dt  K d

0

d
e(t ) 
dt

where Kp, Ki and Kd are the proportional, integral and

derivative gains, respectively.
r(t)

e(t)

PID
Controller

u(t)

Plant

y(t)

Figure 1. A plant controlled by a PID controller

In general, the objective of PID controllers like any other

controller is to provide stability as well as reference tracking
and disturbance rejection, which are all design criteria
related to steady domain of response. Different indices have
been suggested to evaluate the performance of a controller
based on the above objectives. The most common ones are
the integrated absolute error (IAE), integrated squared error
(ISE), integrated time squared error (ITSE), and integrated

379

time absolute error (ITAE). These indices are normally

calculated under step testing input in the time domain as:

features of most bee algorithms [12]. Teodorovic has also

proposed Bee Colony Optimization (BCO) metaheuristic and
applied it to transportation problems [13].
For optimization in continuous domains, Yang developed
f
f
a method called Virtual Bee Algorithm (VBA) which was
IAE
r (t )  y (t ) dt
e(t ) dt
applied to optimize benchmark functions with maximum
dimension of two [14]. The Bees Algorithm (BA) by Pham
0
0
f
et al. is a promising technique similar to ABC, originally
introduced in 2005 [15]. It was later applied to various
ISE
e 2 (t )dt
problems such as machine jobs scheduling, tuning fuzzy
0

 logic controllers for a robot gymnast [16], data clustering,

f
and multi-objective optimization of engineering problems.
ITSE
te 2 (t )dt
Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm, the method
0
employed in this paper, was presented by Karaboga in 2005
f
to optimize numeric benchmark functions [17]. It was then
ITAE
t e(t ) dt
extended by Karaboga and Basturk and showed to
outperform other recognized heuristic methods such as GA
0
[18] as well as DE, PSO and EA [19]. In addition, it has been
Obviously as they all represent the concept of error;
successfully applied on constrained optimization problems,
minimization of these indices is desired.
neural networks [20], and for designing IIR filters [21].
For the transient domain of response, maximum
B. Algorithm Description
overshoot (OS), settling time (ts) and rise time (tr) are
normally considered significant where the benefit of faster
Similar to other nature-based algorithms, ABC models
systems, necessitates minimum possible values for them.
honey bees but not necessarily precisely. In this model, the
For tuning PID controllers that is finding the optimum
honey bees are categorized as employed, onlooker and scout.
gains for the best performance, one or a weighted
An employed bee is a forager associated with a certain food
combination of these criteria is employed. While weights and
source which she is currently exploiting. She memorizes the
number of indices are diversely reported in the literature, it is
quality of the food source and then after returning to the
generally accepted that time weighted indices are more
hive, shares it with other bees waiting there via a peculiar
appropriate as the errors occurring later in the transient
communication called waggle dance.
response are penalized heavily. In this paper, selection of any
An onlooker bee is an unemployed bee at the hive which
of these criteria has been constrained by benchmark
tries to find a new food source using the information
problems, though ITSE index is calculated and reported
provided by employed bees. A scout, ignoring the others
independently to make comparisons more sensible.
information, searches around the hive randomly.
In nature, the recruitment of unemployed bees happens in
III. ARTIFICIAL BEE COLONY (ABC) METHOD
a nearly similar way. In addition, when the quality of a food
source is below a certain level, it will be abandoned to make
A. Introduction
the bees explore for new food sources.
Natural behavior of bees and their collective activities in
In ABC, the solution candidates are modeled as food
their hives has been fascinating researchers for centuries.
sources and their corresponding objective functions as the
Recently, the studies focused on swarm intelligence followed
quality (nectar amount) of the food source. For the first step,
by developing swarm optimization methods have
the artificial employed bees are randomly scattered in the
unbelievably extended our knowledge about animal societies
search domain producing SN initial solutions. Here, SN
especially insect colonies. Ants, termites, wasps and bees are
represents the number of employed or onlooker bees which
the most important social insects inspiring efficient problemare considered equal until the end of algorithm. It is notable
solving algorithms [10, 11].
that any of these solutions xi (i=1, 2, SN) is a DSeveral algorithms have been proposed based on the
dimensional vector representing D design variables
foraging behavior of bees and unlike other metaheuristics
constructing the objective function.
where there is a unique original paper on which other
After this initialization, the main loop of the algorithm
improvement are based; in bee methods, these versions have
described hereafter is repeated for a predetermined number
been independently proposed and developed.
of cycles or until a termination criterion is satisfied.
Regarding combinatorial optimization, the works of
First, all employed bees attempt to find new solutions in
Tereshko are leading. He and his colleagues modeled robots
the neighbor of the solution (food source) they memorized at
as bees having limited intelligence individually, but their
the previous cycle. If the quality (the amount of objective
cooperative behavior makes real robotic tasks possible. They
function) is higher at this new solution, then she forgets the
also introduced significant task allocation in bee-based
former and memorizes the new one. In ABC, a particular
models including employed and unemployed bees.
mechanism is devised for this purpose which only allows one
Regarding food sources, the modes of recruitment to and
of the dimensions of the current solution being subjected to
abandonment from is established, which are the main
modification:

380

vij

xij  Iij ( xij  x kj ) 



pi

fit i

SN

fit

SIMULATION RESULTS

A. Test Problems 1 and 2

The two processes mentioned below are taken from [9]
which are of different orders of 3 and 4, respectively.

where j ^1,2,, D` and k ^1,2,, SN ` are randomly

chosen indices. It should be noted that k z i . The parameter
I is also a random number in the domain [-1, 1].
After that, the onlooker bees should select the solution
around which they explore for new food sources. This is
performed probabilistically i.e. a mechanism like roulette
wheel is employed using the fitness (the related objective
function or a similar concept) of all current solutions. With
the help of a uniform random number generator, the
solutions for further exploration can be easily determined:

IV.

G1 ( s)


G2 ( s )

4.228
( s  0.5)(s 2  1.64s  8.456)

27
( s  1)(s  3) 3

The objective function for minimization is defined as the

weighted sum of integrated squared error (ISE), response
overshoot (OS) in percent, and the 5 percent settling time (ts)
 for the step input as follows [9]:

n 1

Noticeably, some onlooker bees might be directed to

search around identical solutions. When the solutions are
selected, producing new candidate solutions around them is
done the same way employed bees perform using (3).
Additionally, updating food sources is done with the same
greedy process by comparing the new solutions produced by
onlookers and the corresponding current solutions. It is
notable that different approaches have been proposed for
assigning fitness to solutions especially when minimization
is to be done with an originally maximizing algorithm such
as ABC or when negative values of objective function is
engaged. Karaboga [22] has utilized a familiar form
described below which is adopted in this paper as well.

10( ISE )  3(t s )  (OS ) 

In [9], a population size of 20 and a maximum generation

of 100 are used for the genetic algorithm. Therefore, hive
population of 20 (10 of each employed and onlooker) bees
and maximum iteration of 100 is considered. The search
domain for PID gains which are the design variables here is
[0.1, 5]. To implement the algorithm, D=3 is assigned to
represent three design variables Kp, Ki and Kd as PID gains.
The indices employed in (8) are computed based on a modelbased response analysis of the processes using MATLAB.
The results obtained by ABC and the other available
methods in the literature are summarized in Table I. In
addition, the step response of both systems G1 and G2 using
PID controllers tuned by Z-N [9], MGA [9] and ABC are
demonstrated in Fig 2. Clearly, ABC has outperformed the
1
best available solutions obtained by MGA and for both
fi t 0
1  f
fiti


 processes G1 and G2, an improvement of about 13% is
i
achieved. In addition, it is noticeable that the optimal gains
1  f
fi  0
i
obtained by ABC are not in the neighborhood of the ones

reported by MGA. This proves that ABC has been well

equipped not to trap in local optima though the optimization
where f i is the objective function of solution xi .
problem is not constrained and the problem space is convex.
If a solution can not be improved by employed or
The additional ITSE index reported here also highlights the
onlooker bees after certain iterations called limit, then the
performance of ABC against other methods. Furthermore,
solution is abandoned and the bee becomes a scout. In that
having a look on the amounts of ISE, OS and ts, it is
case, the scout bee searches randomly for a new solution
observed that except for the case of overshoot in G2, ABC
within the search space. It should be reminded that at each
has reduced them independently which is of importance from
cycle, only one artificial bee is allowed to become scout and
the designing point of view. To complete the analysis on
perform the search as follows:
tuned PID controllers, it is necessary to discuss amplitude of
control signals. The obtained results confirm that the orders
j
j
j
j
xi xmin  M ( xmax  x min ) 

 of amplitude of signals are limited and quite the same. As no
further information about the physical aspects of the
controlled processes is available, it is not possible to evaluate
where M is a random number in domain [0, 1]. Obviously,
any boundaries for the maximum allowable amplitude of
variables of all dimensions are replaced with new randomlycontrol signals in any of test problems. Finally, it is notable
generated values.
that the step response of G2 tuned by ABC exhibits an
undershoot of about 42%. Although undershoot is generally
considered a minor parameter, it might be important in a
certain plant. Anyway, the problem formulation does not
include undershoot in this paper.

381

TABLE I.

OPTIMIZED PID GAINS AND CORESSPONDING PERFORMANCE INDICES FOR PROCESSES G1 AND G2

Process

Index

Z-N [9]
2.19
2.126
0.565
0.231
0.526
5.45
17
38.61
3.072
2.272
1.038
0.331
0.628
3.722
32.8
50.246

Kp
Ki
Kd
ITSE

G1

ISE
ts (5%)
OS (%)
f
Kp
Ki
Kd
ITSE

G2

ISE
ts (5%)
OS (%)
f

Kitamori [4]
2.357
1.429
0.976
0.219
0.596
2.3
10.9
23.760

Fuzzy [4]
0.533
5.01
6.1
26.46
0.537
2.632
1.9
15.166

MGA [9]
1.637
0.965
0.388
0.344
0.664
2.89
3.4
18.71
1.772
1.061
0.773
0.283
0.68
1.65
0.16
11.91

ABC
2.766
1.263
2.415
0.266
0.399
3.45
1.938
16.28
2.141
1.248
1.145
0.202
0.574
1.34
0.599
10.36

The sign - indicates that the results are not reported in the literature
1.4

1.4
Z-N
MGA
ABC

1.2

0.8

0.8

0.6

0.6

0.4

0.4

0.2

0.2

10

12

14

Z-N
MGA
ABC

1.2

16

10

12

14

16

Figure 2. Step response of processes G1 (left) and G2 (right) having PID controllers tuned by Z-N, MGA and ABC

population of 20 are considered. The search space is also

assigned [0, 5] for all three gains.
In Table II, the results obtained by ABC are presented
versus those obtained by evolutionary programming (EP)
and GA (the bests so far) and some other approaches
including Ziegler-Nichols (Z-N), fuzzy gain scheduling
(FGS), fuzzy set-point weighting (FSW), incremental fuzzy
0.1s
expert (IFE) as well as two further techniques; a fuzzy based
e

 method called SSP and a method based on optimizing setG3 ( s )

(1  s )(1  0.5s )(1  0.25s )(1  0.125s )
point weights called Fix b. ABC has been able to improve
the results noticeably. While all the other error indices of
Unlike the previous problems, the tuning progression is
IAE are above 1, ABC has found the optimum with the
defined single-objective with only IAE being the
objective function equal to 0.74 which is a 30% decrease
performance index. For conformity, the optimization settings
with respect to the best available solution.
are taken from [8]. Hence, maximum 120 iterations with hive
The EP optimum gains and performance criteria reported
in [8] and the ones obtained by ABC are comprehensively
B. Test Problem 3
The other test problem is a process taken from [8] being
of more complex nature due to its time delay which makes it
more intricate for the optimization procedure to find the
optimum.

382

presented in Table 3. In addition, the step response of the

system with PID controllers tuned by both is illustrated in
Fig. 3. It is clearly shown that not only the IAE index is
improved but also all the other significant indices of ITSE,
ISE, overshoot and settling time have been improved as well
TABLE II.
Tuning Method
IAE Index
TABLE III.

which confirms the efficiency of the employed method

against other tuning approaches.
Finally, the convergence history of IAE as the objective
function is illustrated in Fig. 4. It is clear that only 17 out of
100 iterations has been sufficient to find the optimum
indicating that the algorithm is as fast as it is efficient.

MINIMUM IAE INDEX OBTAINED BY DIFFERENT APPROACHES FOR PROCESS G3

Z-N

FGS

FSW

SSP

Fix b

IFE

EP

GA

ABC

1.59

1.31

1.30

1.29

1.25

1.22

1.06

1.05

0.74

OPTIMIZED GAINS AND PEROFORMANCE INDICES FOR PROCESS G3 OBTAINED BY EP AND ABC

Method

Kp

Ki

Kd

IAE

ISE

ITSE

ts (5%)

OS (%)

EP [8]

3.19
2.75

1.03
1.64

1.51
1.65

1064
0.744

0.530
0.491

0.244
0.148

4.72
2.53

12.13
9.44

ABC

1.2

1.2
1.15

1
1.1
1.05

EP
ABC

0.8

IAE

1
0.6

0.95
0.9

0.4
0.85
0.8
0.2
0.75
0
0

10

12

0.7

14

Figure 3. Step response of process G3 with PID tuned by EP and ABC

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CONCLUSIONS

Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm was employed to

tune PID controllers for plants of high order and with time
delay. The method optimized PID gains as design variables
in both single- and multi-objective approaches. The objective
functions taken from literature were important performance
indices of ITSE, ISE and IAE as well as overshoot and
settling time. Results clearly expressed that the utilized
method has been successful in comparison to genetic
algorithm, evolutionary programming (EP), fuzzy rule-based
approaches and some other techniques; and can be
considered as a powerful tuning scheme for controllers.

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Figure 4. Convergence history of ABC algorithm during tuning process G3

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Psudo-code available at artifical bee colony algorithm
homepage: http://mf.erciyes.edu.tr/abc/pub/PsuedoCode.pdf