This paper proposes a novel tuning design of proportional integral derivative (PID) controller via improved kidney-inspired algorithm (IKA) with a new objective function. The main objective of the proposed approach is to optimize the transient response of the AVR system by minimizing the maximum overshoot, settling time, rise time and peak time values of the terminal voltage and eliminating the steady state error. After obtaining the optimal values of the three gains of the PID controller (KP, KI and KD) with the proposed approach, the transient response analysis was performed and compared with some of the current heuristic algorithms based approaches in literature to show the superiority of the optimized PID controller. In order to evaluate the stability of the automatic voltage regulator (AVR) system tuned by IKA method, the pole/zero map analysis and Bode analysis are performed. Finally, the robustness analysis of the proposed approach has been carried out with variations in the parameters of AVR system. The numerical simulation results demonstrated that the proposed IKA tuned PID controller has better control performances compared to the other existing approaches. The essence of the presented study points out that the proposed approach may successfully be applied for the AVR system.

A novel design method is presented to determine optimum proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller parameters of an automatic voltage regulator (AVR) system utilizing the grasshopper optimization algorithm (GOA). The proposed approach is a simple and effective algorithm that is able to solve many optimization problems even those with unknown search spaces effectively. The simplicity of algorithm provides high quality tuning of optimal PID controller parameters. The integral of time weighted squared error (ITSE) is used as the performance index to confirm the performance of the proposed GOA-PID controller. When compared to the other PID controllers based on Ziegler- Nichols (ZN), differential evolution (DE), and artificial bee colony (ABC) tuning methods, the proposed method is found highly effective and robust to improve AVR system's transient response.