Application of combinatorial interaction design for DC servomotor PID controller tuning (Q2249325)

Summary: Combinatorial optimization has been used in different research areas. It has been employed successfully in software testing fields to construct minimum sets of combinations (i.e., in terms of size) which in turn represent the minimum number of test cases. It was also found to be a successful approach that can be applied to solve other similar problems in different fields of research. In line with this approach, this paper presents a new application of the combinational optimization in the design of PID controller for DC servomotors. The design of PID controllers involves the determination of three parameters. To find optimal initial PID parameters, different tuning methods have been proposed and designed in the literature. The combinatorial design is concerned with the arrangement of finite set of elements into combinatorial set that satisfies some given constraints. Consequently, the proposed method takes the interaction of the input parameters as a constraint for constructing this combinatorial set. The generated sets are then used in the proposed tuning method. The method proved its effectiveness within a set of experiments in a simulated environment.