Abstract:
Mathematical analysis of operational system results in a large scale representation
demanding a rigorous study. The necessity is fulfilled by the precise mathematics
motivating towards the fractional calculus. Thus, fractional calculus is of great
importance for accurate and complete study and analysis of any system or structure. In
addition, many physical phenomena bear “intrinsic” fractional order interpretation
demanding an illumination from the fractional order calculus. History of fractional
calculus is dated around 300 years old but due to having tough mathematics and
unavailability of efficient and suitable toolbox it was untouched. From last few decades
its non-integer characteristics has atracted the focus of researchers and now it is being
extensively exercised for fractional modelling and control. Advantage of fractional
control theory is the involvement of both engineering and mathematics to achieve the
desired performance for a set of specifications. Significantly, Fractional order control is
the application of fractional calculus producing more accurate result than the
conventional one.
A variety of fractional order controllers are practiced in the literature for getting
desired response from a specific class of system. Extensively accepted among the
controllers is the Fractional order proportional, integral and derivative (FOPID)
controller, symbolised asPI D
. FOPID controller is the universal form of the
conventional PID controller offering two extra tuning lumps, the fractional power of integral control (λ) and derivative control(µ). These additional degrees of freedoms are the supreme inspiration for the researchers to propose excellent controller for any system.
The most complicated assignment for designing the FOPID controller is to locate the
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appropriate value of the all five controller parameters (i.e. , , , ,and P I D K K K )
simultaneously, for which various rule-based, analytical and numerical tuning techniques
are available. Several toolbars like CRONE, NINTEGER, and FOMCON, etc. are also
available for design and implementation of fractional order controllers.
A simple rule based optimization technique known as Nelder and Mead algorithm
(NM-Algorithm) was introduced by Nelder and Mead in 1965. It minimizes a nonlinear
function of n variables by applying a process of pattern search without having any
derivative information about the variables. The technique has been used for optimization
of many engineering problems including design of conventional PID controller but it has
never been practiced for optimization of FOPID controller parameters. This motivates for
usage of this technique to optimize the parameters of FOPID controller.
Further, the estimation of variables through Swarm Intelligence (SI) based
techniques under numerical tuning methodologies is extensively available in the
literature. These techniques are inspired by hunting and searching strategy of a particular
species present in nature. As per author’s cram and analysis, none of the SI techniques
imitate the leadership quality as of hierarchy of grey wolves for optimization of FOPID
controller parameters. Reason for its acceptability is the efficient hunting strategy in
packs. This technique is a recent meta-heuristic technique known as Grey Wolf Optimizer
(GWO). This motivates to implement the social behaviour of grey wolves for finding the
optimum value of the parameters of the FOPID controller.
Lastly, a Modified Grey Wolf Optimizer (MGWO) is presented for optimization
of FOPID controller parameters. Moreover, a novel fitness function is defined for
optimization using MGWO technique. This fitness function is represented in terms of
rise-time (RT), settling-time (ST), peak-overshoot (MP), Gain-Margin (GM), Phase
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Margin (PM), integral time weighted absolute error (ITAE) and integral time weighted
square error (ITSE).
Thus, this thesis proposes the research of fractional calculus in the context to the
design of fractional order PI and PID controller and their parameter optimization using
three different techniques namely NM-algorithm, GWO and MGWO. The introductory
part of the thesis presents a brief theoretical background, preliminaries and definitions of
fractional calculus, desired for designing the fractional order controller. The introduction
is followed by the illustration about the applications of fractional calculus and fractional
order control. Latter part of this thesis describes the three different optimization
algorithms implemented for optimization of FOPID controller parameters for different
type of systems like magnetic levitation system, non-monotonic phase system, non
minimum phase system with time delay; second order system with time delay, second
order linear system, automatic voltage regulator (AVR) system, and spherical tank
system.
The performance of the proposed optimization algorithms for optimization of
FOPID controller parameters is validated with existing FOPID as well as classical PID
controllers in the literature. All the work is performed with FOMCON toolbox in
MATLAB environment. The thesis is further organized as follows: Chapter 1 establish a brief review of literature offering the motivation of this work. It also gives an insight into the organization of the work carried out in the thesis. Chapter 2 contributes the necessary preliminaries required for this work. In addition, stability of the fractional order system, approximation
of fractional order operators, and an overview of FOMCON toolbox are also discussed.
Moreover, this chapter also enlighten the fractional order controllers in different forms and advantages of using fractional order controllers. Chapter 3 presents a brief
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