On Fractional-Order PID Design

Abstract

Fractional-order calculus is an area of mathematics that deals with derivatives and integrals from non-integer orders. In other words, it is a generalization of the traditional calculus that leads to similar concepts and tools, but with a much wider applicability. In the last two decades, fractional calculus has been rediscovered by scientists and engineers and applied in an increasing number of fields, namely in the area of control theory. The success of fractional-order controllers is unquestionable with a lot of success due to emerging of effective methods in differentiation and integration of non-integer order equations. Fractional-order proportional-integral-derivative (FOPID) controllers have received a considerable attention in the last years both from academic and industrial point of view. In fact, in principle, they provide more flexibility in the controller design, with respect to the standard PID controllers,because they have five parameters to select (instead of three). However, this also implies that the tuning of the controller can be much more complex. In order to address this problem, different methods for the design of a FOPID controller have been proposed in the literature. The concept of FOPID controllers was proposed by Podlubny in 1997 (Podlubny et al., 1997; Podlubny, 1999a). He also demonstrated the better response of this type of controller, in comparison with the classical PID controller, when used for the control of fractional order systems. A frequency domain approach by using FOPID controllers is also studied in (Vinagre et al., 2000). In (Monje et al., 2004), an optimization method is presented where the parameters of the FOPID are tuned such that predefined design specifications are satisfied. Ziegler-Nichols tuning rules for FOPID are reported in (Valerio & Costa, 2006). Further research activities are runnig in order to develop new tuning methods and investigate the applications of FOPIDs. In (Jesus & Machado, 2008) control of heat diffusion system via FOPID controllers are studied and different tuning methods are applied. Control of an irrigation canal using rule-based FOPID is given in (Domingues, 2010). In (Karimi et al., 2009) the authors applied an optimal FOPID tuned by Particle Swarm Optimzation (PSO) algorithm to control the Automatic Voltage Regulator (AVR) system. There are other papers published in the recent