The power electronics industry is undergoing a revolution driven by an industry 4.0 perspective, with smart and green/hybrid energy management systems being the requirement of the future. There is a need to highlight the potential of fractional order control in power electronics for the highly efficient systems of tomorrow. This paper reviews the developments in fractional order control in power electronics ranging from stand-alone power converters, industrial drives and electric vehicles to renewable energy systems and management in smart grids and microgrids. Various controllers used in power electronics such as the fractional order PI/PID (FOPI/FOPID) and fractional-order sliding mode controllers have been discussed in detail. This review indicates that the plug-and-play type of intelligent fractional order systems needs to be developed for our sustainable future. The review also points out that there is tremendous scope for the design of modular fractional-order intelligent controllers. Such controllers can be embedded into power converters, resulting in smart power electronic systems that contribute to the faster and greener implementation of industry 4.0 standards.

The control of power converters is difficult due to their non-linear nature and, hence, the quest for smart and efficient controllers is continuous and ongoing. Fractional-order controllers have demonstrated superior performance in power electronic systems in recent years. However, it is a challenge to attain optimal parameters of the fractional-order controller for such types of systems. This article describes the optimal design of a fractional order PID (FOPID) controller for a buck converter using the cohort intelligence (CI) optimization approach. The CI is an artificial intelligence-based socio-inspired meta-heuristic algorithm, which has been inspired by the behavior of a group of candidates called a cohort. The FOPID controller parameters are designed for the minimization of various performance indices, with more emphasis on the integral squared error (ISE) performance index. The FOPID controller shows faster transient and dynamic response characteristics in comparison to the conventional PID controller. Comparison of the proposed method with different optimization techniques like the GA, PSO, ABC, and SA shows good results in lesser computational time. Hence the CI method can be effectively used for the optimal tuning of FOPID controllers, as it gives comparable results to other optimization algorithms at a much faster rate. Such controllers can be optimized for multiple objectives and used in the control of various power converters giving rise to more efficient systems catering to the Industry 4.0 standards.

Dynamic and robust controllers are the inherent requirement of power electronic converters, which are subjected to dynamic variations and nonlinearities. The effectiveness of fractional order controllers in non-linear system control has been well-established by studies in the past few decades. Various forms of fractional order controllers have been used in power-electronic control. Recent research indicates that complex order controllers, extensions of fractional controllers, are more robust against uncertainties and non-linearities than their integer and fractional order counterparts. Though complex order controllers have been employed in various nonlinear plants, they have not been extensively tested on power electronic applications. Also, the design and tuning of the controller is difficult. This paper investigates the effectiveness of a complex order PID controller on a typical power electronic DC-DC buck converter for the first time. Two types of complex order controllers of the form PI^{a+ib}D^c and PI^{a+ib}D^{c+id} were designed for a power electronic buck converter. The complex order controllers were implemented in Simulink and the optimal tuning of the complex order controller parameters for various performance indices was performed using different optimization algorithms. The Cohort Intelligence algorithm was found to give the most optimal results. Both the complex controllers showed more robustness towards uncertainties than the linear and fractional PID controllers. The PI^{a+ib}D^c controller gave the smoothest and fastest response under non-linearities. The dynamic performance of the complex order controller is the best and can be expected to be useful for more power electronic applications.