Multi-loop PID Controller Design for Distillation Column using Firefly Algorithm

Abstract

Abstract-The main motivation of this manuscript is to develop a PID tuning procedure to improve the performance of the benchmark distillation column models using the heuristic firefly algorithm. A decentralised PID tuning approach is developed to design an independent PID controller for the top and bottom product loop. Minimization of a multi-objective function is chosen to guide the search process of the controller tuning procedure. The performance of the proposed approach is confirmed by evaluating the time domain parameters and the error values. From the experimental results, the main observation is that, proposed approach offers satisfactory result on the proposed approach and helps to achieve a reduced values of the time domain and error values. The proposed approach proves its efficiency in a benchmark Two Input Two Output (TITO) system. In future, this approach can be adopted to design controller for the multi-loop and non-linear systems existing in the process control literature. The proposed approach can also be compared against other heuristic approaches existing in the literature.