Comparative study of PID controller designs for AVR using different optimization techniques

This paper presents the optimal PID tuning study to improve the dynamic performance of an automatic voltage regulation (AVR) system. The system under study consists of a synchronous generator whose reference voltage changes in a step function and tries to overcome the transient behavior of its terminal voltage smoothly. To optimally control the performance, different optimization techniques are applied to tune the controller gains to obtain the minimum steady state error (main objective) and better dynamic characteristics (rise time, settling time, max overshoot, etc.). Then the AVR system responses with a PID controller based on different optimization techniques are compared to find out which is the best technique.