Advanced Control and Optimization Techniques in AC Drives and DC/AC Sine Wave Voltage Inverters: Selected Problems

This chapter presents the application of a particle swarm optimization (PSO) to a controller tuning in selected power electronic and drive systems. The chapter starts with a relatively simple tuning of a cascaded PI speed and position control system for a BLDC servo drive. This example serves as the background for a discussion on selecting the objective function for the PSO. Then the PSO is used in two challenging controller tuning tasks. This includes optimizing selected learning parameters in the adaptive artificial neural network (ANN) based online trained speed controller for an urban vehicle (3D problem) and selecting penalty factors in the LQR with augmented state (i.e. with oscillatory terms) for a three-phase four-leg sine wave inverter (15D problem). It is demonstrated with the help of these case studies why and where the PSO, or any other similar population based stochastic search algorithm, can be beneficial. Engineers encounter many non-straightforward controller tuning problems in power electronic systems and this chapter illustrates that in some cases it is relatively easy to reduce these tasks into the objective function selection problem. The relevant controller parameters are then determined automatically by the PSO.