Optimal decentralized PI control design for a benchmark process control system with time delay: A modified whale optimization algorithm

This paper presents a new optimal decentralized PI controller design based on a modified hybrid whale optimization approach that is addressed for a typical industrial benchmark process control device. This research work determines the gain parameters of the PID controllers using the modified whale optimization algorithm (mWOA), aiming to achieve efficient performance by taking into account the integral time absolute error (ITAE) cost function. Further, the stability and performance of the proposed controller are verified by considering multiplicative input and output uncertainty. A comparison has been made between the performance of the proposed decentralized control method and a traditional decentralized PID controller architecture. The obtained results highlight that the proposed controller exhibits superior control performance in inevitable practical scenarios, such as in the face of additive stochastic uncertainties and load perturbation.