Plug-in direct particle swarm repetitive controller with a reduced dimensionality of a fitness landscape – a multi-swarm approach

The paper describes a modification to the recently developed plug-in direct particle swarm repetitive controller (PDPSRC) for the sine-wave constant-amplitude constant-frequency (CACF) voltage-source inverter (VSI). The original PDPSRC algorithm assumes that the particle swarm optimizer (PSO) takes into account a performance index defined over the whole reference signal period. Each particle stores all the samples of the control signal, e.g. α = 200 samples for a controller working at 10 kHz and the reference frequency equal to 50 Hz. Therefore, the fitness landscape (i.e. the performance index) is α-dimensional (αD), which makes optimization challenging. That solution can be categorized as the single-swarm one. It has been previously shown that the swarm controller does not suffer from long-term stability issues encountered in the classic iterative learning controllers (ILC). However, the convergence of the swarm has to be kept at a relatively low rate to enable successful exploitation in the αD search space, which in turn results in slow responsiveness of the PDPSRC. Here a multi-swarm approach is proposed in which we divide a dynamic optimization problem (DOP) among less dimensional swarms. The reference signal period is segmented into shorter intervals and the control signal is optimized in each interval independently by separate swarms. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is illustrated with the help of numerical experiments on the CACF VSI with an output LC filter operating under nonlinear loads.