Designing an Optimal Robust Controller for an Automatic Voltage Regulator via Ant Colony Optimization for Continuous Domain

Providing constancy of the nominal voltage level is a major concern in the planning of electric power systems. One of the effective methods to achieve a nominal voltage level is controlling the exciter voltage of the generator. This is done by using AVR. To ensure a better performance of the AVR system under whole operating conditions, the employing of a robust control strategy is essential. In this paper, the PID controller is adopted as a control strategy. Despite its simple structure, the setting of the PID controller parameters is difficult to obtain the robust closed-loop system. In general, there is no straightforward relation between the performance indexes and the controller parameters. To overcome this problem, the control design problem is transformed into an optimization one, and a new performance criterion function is introduced. This new function includes both time-domain and frequency-domain specifications. The Gain and phase margined are maximized in this function to ensure the robustness of the system despite uncertainties; meanwhile, the rise time and overshoot of the step response are minimized to achieve the best performance in the time domain. Ant colony optimization for the continuous domain is used for solving this multi-objective optimization problem. Detailed comparative simulations are carried out via the Monte-Carlo method to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.