Design of PID Controller Using Cuckoo Search

Algorithm for Buck-Boost Converter of LED Driver

Circuit
Piyush Verma1, Nitish Patel1, Nirmal-Kumar C. Nair1, Afzal Sikander2
1
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
pver055@aucklanduni.ac.nz, nd.patel@auckland.ac.nz, n.nair@auckland.ac.nz
2
Department of Electrical Engineering
Graphic Era University, Dehradun, India
afzal.sikander@hotmail.com

Abstract— The Light Emitting Diode (LED) based lighting
technology is the latest technological innovation in the lighting
industry, and it is still evolving to make it more reliable,
compatible and sustainable solution. The heart of the LED
lighting technology is the driver circuit, and the current driver
topologies are creating significant power quality issues. This
paper presents a new approach to design proportional-integral-
derivative (PID) controller that will improve the performance of
buck-boost converter of LED driver circuit. The optimal values
of the gains of PID controller are obtained by minimizing the
performance criterion using cuckoo search (CS) optimization
algorithm. The performance of the proposed controller i.e.
CSPID for buck-boost converter is evaluated by time response
specifications such as maximum peak overshoot, rise time,
settling time and steady state error. Furthermore, the results
obtained by proposed CSPID controller is compared with the
results of PID controller designed by genetic algorithm (GA) and
particle swarm optimization (PSO) in terms of evaluation time
and settling time, and it is revealed that the proposed controller
exhibit better performance as compared to other controllers for
the buck-boost converter of LED driver circuit.
Keywords—LED Driver Circuit; Buck-Boost Converter;
Cuckoo Search Algorithm; PID controller
I. INTRODUCTION
With the boost of electronic devices in today’s world, the
power quality has become a major concern for power system
researchers as well as technology developers. A low power
factor draws more current from the grid and, the higher
harmonic distortion of the current may create a variety of
interference problems in the network. Recently, LED lighting
technology has been recognized due to its higher efficiency,
long life, less maintenance, and environment-friendly
characteristics [1-3]. However, the LEDs’ driver circuit
configuration is responsible for variety of power quality issues
in the AC mains current [4-8] and therefore, different power
factor corrected ac-dc converters are being used. Buck, boost,
buck-boost and cuk are some of the converters [9] that are
commonly used in the LED driver circuit. These converters
are mainly consisting of inductors, capacitors, and
semiconductor switching devices and used for converting a dc
source from one voltage level to another voltage level. All
these converters could be operated in continuous and
discontinuous current conduction mode depending on the
power level requirement of the converter. For efficient driving
of LED lamps, it is very important to choose the right
converter topology and correct integrated circuit for the
switching converter.
A simple block diagram of the LED driver circuit is shown in
Figure 1 which includes ac source, bridge rectifier for ac-dc
conversion, dc-dc converter to convert one voltage level to
another voltage level and the LEDs. The role of these dc-dc
converters are primarily important to achieve low total
harmonic distortion, high power factor, constant output
voltage and fast dynamic response. There are various
techniques available for modeling of these dc-dc converters
like state-space averaging (SSA) method [10, 11] signal flow
graph (SFG) technique [12], [13]etc. However, the major
problem with these techniques are their computational
complexity as it requires significant amount of resources to
solve such problems. Another approach to achieve fast
dynamic response of converts is PID controller. There are
numerous techniques have been developed in literature to
deign PID controllers for different converters [14-15].
Nowadays, evolutionary algorithms are widely used in various
fields [16-17].
Bridge DC-DC
AC Converter LED
Rectifier
(AC-DC)
Fig. 1. Block diagram of LED driver circuit

978-1-5090-1546-7/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE 1

Therefore, in this paper, a buck-boost dc-dc converter is
considered for LED driver circuit, and three different PID
controllers are designed to achieve the constant output voltage
for the LED lamps: (i) GA-based PID controller (ii) PSO
based PID controller and (iii) Cuckoo search based PID
controller. The results obtained by these controllers are
compared in terms of different response specifications such as
rise time, settling time, maximum peak overshoot, steady sate
error and the evaluation time of the algorithm. It is observed
that the proposed CSPID controller exhibit better performance
as compared to GAPID and PSOPID controllers.
II. BUCK-BOOST CONVERTER AND PID CONTROLLER
Buck-boost converter is a type of dc-dc converter that
combines the basic principle of buck converter and boost
converter in a single circuit and gives the output voltage lower
or higher than the input voltage. The circuit diagram of the
buck-boost converter is shown in Fig. 2 [15], whereas Fig. 3
shows the block diagram of proposed methodology to design
PID controller for buck-boost converter based on CS
algorithm.
iD
D -
- their survival is possible. It has been anticipated by foraging
R Vo
Vs VL ic
+ +
Fig. 2. Buck-boost converter
The structure of PID controller is represented as:
( )= + + (3)
where, k p , ki and k d are proportional, integral and derivative
gains of PID controller, respectively. The aim is to obtain the
optimal values of these three gains.
III. PROPOSED METHODOLOGY FOR CONTROLLER DESIGN
A. Cuckoo Search Algorithm
Cuckoo Search (CS) is an optimization algorithm which is
developed by Yang and Deb [18, 19]. This algorithm is based
on the common behavior of reproduction by cuckoos. They
put their eggs into the eyries of other host birds and if the host
bird realizes that the particular egg does not belong to their
eyrie, it will be thrown away by the host bird or the host bird
prefers to develop a new eyrie somewhere else. So, the
evolution of cuckoo eggs becomes the imitative of the eggs of
endemic crew birds. Each egg in an eyrie represents a
solution, and a cuckoo egg represents a new solution. The
objective is always to use the better solution (cuckoos) and
replace the previous not-so-good solution. Further, as the birds
do not have any idea about the locations of food origin but yet
theory that random walk in Lévy pattern maximizes the
possibility of finding the food origin. It has been identified
that the Lévy flights are same as random stroll, in most of the
families of animals and insects. The prototype of Lévy random
stroll consists of uniform distribution for calculation of yaw
angles and flight step length [18].

Here, the closed loop step response of buck-boost converter is

CS Algorithm Objective Function improved by employing PWM through PID controller. The
gains of PID controller are determined using Cuckoo search
algorithm by minimizing the objective function as shown in
GBBC (s) Figure 3. The integral square error (ISE) between output and
Vo(s)
Vref(s)
PID Controller PWM
Buck-Boost reference voltage, Vref (t ) and Vo (t ) , respectively, is used as
Converter
+
- fitness function in this paper, which is given as follows:
f
Z ³ 0
(Vref (t )  Vo (t )) 2 dt (4)
Voltage Divider The following steps are used to obtain optimal values of
controller parameters.
Step 1 State the fitness function and choice of unknown (say
Fig. 3. Buck-boost converter with PID controller M). Set the minimum and maximum values of chosen
unknown. It can be formulated mathematically as-
The transfer function of the buck-boost converter is Minimize Z,
represented as follows [15]: Subject to
k pL  k p  k pU ,
( − )+( − )+ (1 − )
= (1) kiL  ki  kiU ,
+ + (1 − )
kdL  kd  kdU
0.4331 + 67.668
( )= (2)
1.92 × 10 + 0.0003 + 37.356

2
where k pL , kiL , kdL and k pU , kiU , kdU are the minimum and help in improving the dynamic power quality performance of
the LED driver circuit.
maximum values of the controller parameters.
TABLE II. GAINS OF PID CONTROLLER
Step 2 Select a cuckoo (say α) arbitrarily by Lévy flights,
assess its aptness Zα and select a nest out of N (say β) Controller
arbitrarily.
Proposed CSPID 17.2045 78.5387 2.8852
Step 3 Swap β by the newly answer if Z D ! Z E .
Step 4 If the specified number of population passed or some
PSOPID 2.0443 44.2727 3.0340
discontinuing condition is encountered, abandon a fraction (
pa ) of worst nest (and construct a new nest at new places)
GAPID 0.8114 10.0000 0.1000
and retain the best solution else go to step 2.

The following equation is used for generation of next solution

for cuckoo i via Lévy flight [18]. TABLE III. TIME RESPONSE SPECIFICATIONS WITH CONTROLLERS

Evaluation
Yi (t 1) Yi (t )  a … Lévy(O ) (5) Controller ( ) (%) Time (Sec.)
Where step size is denoted by a (a>0). The product …means
entry-wise multiplications. Lévy flights offer an arbitrary path Proposed CSPID 1.9591 0 0 12.326
while their arbitrary steps are drawn from a Lévy distribution
for large steps. PSOPID 2.0619 0 0 37.674
Lévy ~ u = t O ; (1  O d 3) (6)
The parameters of this three different algorithms used are GAPID 9.4556 0 0 55.254
specified in Table I:

TABLE I. SELECTED VALUES OF PARAMETERS FOR ALGORITHMS

Step Response
6
Algorithm Parameters
Number of nests = 25
5
CS Number of iterations = 100
Probability of alien egg =0.25
Number of generations = 300 4
PSO Population size = 100
Amplitude

Maximum Particle velocity = 2 3

Mutation rate = 0.025
Crossover rate = 0.75
GA Replacement factor = 0.6
Selection rate = 0.40
Population size = 500
IV. COMPUTATIONAL RESULTS & DISCUSSION
In this section, the performance of buck-boost converter with
proposed CSPID, GAPID and PSOPID controllers are
analyzed in terms of time response specifications such as
settling time ( ) in seconds, maximum peak overshoot ( )
in percentage and steady state error ( ). The gains of PID
controller are obtained by the execution of ten trials and the
best solutions are tabulated in Table II.
Step responses of the buck-boost converter with CSPID,
PSOPID, and GAPID controllers is shown in Fig. 4. The time
response specifications obtained from these responses are also
specified in Table III. It is observed that the proposed CSPID
controller exhibits the lowest value of settling time among
these different controllers. The lesser value of settling time
shows the faster response of buck-boost converter that would
2
Proposed CS-PID
1 PSO-PID
GA-PID
0
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14
Time (seconds)
Fig. 4. Step response of buck-boost converter with different PID controllers
Furthermore, the stability analyses of all the controllers are
performed using root locus technique as shown in Fig. 5. As
the poles are terminating at zeros which are far away from
imaginary axis, in case of proposed CSPID controller, as
compared to GAPID and PSOPID controllers. Therefore, it
can be stated that the proposed CSPID controller is more
stable as compared to PSOPID and GAPID controller.
Although this paper presents a problem with only 3 degrees of
freedom (unknowns), the stochastic and heuristic nature of the
Cuckoo Search algorithm lends itself to problems with many
degrees of freedoms.

3
 Root Locus [4] A. Blanco and E. Parra, "Effects of high penetration of CFLS and LEDS
Imaginary Axis (seconds-1)

10
Proposed CS-PID on the distribution networks," in Proceedings of 14th International Conference
on Harmonics and Quality of Power-ICHQP 2010, pp. 85-96.
0

-10 [5] R. J. Bravo and N. Y. Abed, "Experimental evaluation of the harmonic

-180 -160 -140 -120 -100 -80 -60 -40 -20 0 20
-1
behavior of LED light bulb," in IEEE Power and Energy Society General
Real Axis (seconds )
Meeting (PES), 2013, pp. 1-4.
Root Locus
Imaginary Axis (seconds-1)

10
PSO-PID
[6] C. Jettanasen and C. Pothisarn, "Analytical study of harmonics issued
0
from LED lamp driver," in Proceedings of the International Multi Conference
of Engineers and Computer Scientists, 2014, pp. 465-471.
-10
-180 -160 -140 -120 -100 -80 -60 -40 -20 0 20
Real Axis (seconds -1)
[7] S. Li, S. Tan, C. K. Lee, E. Waffenschmidt, S. Hui and C. K. Tse, "A
Root Locus
Survey, Classification, and Critical Review of Light-Emitting Diode
Imaginary Axis (seconds-1)

200
GA-PID Drivers," IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, vol. 31, pp. 1503-1516,
0
2016.

-200
-180 -160 -140 -120 -100
Real Axis (seconds -1)
Fig. 5. Stability analysis of different PID controllers
V. CONCLUSION
This paper presents a new approach to design PID controller
for the buck-boost converter of LED driver circuit. The tuning
of controller gains is performed by minimizing the integral
square error between output and reference voltage of buck-
boost converter using cuckoo search algorithm. The step and
frequency responses of the buck-boost converter with
proposed CSPID, PSOPID, and GAPID controllers are
compared. Furthermore, in order to show the efficacy of the
proposed CSPID controller with buck-boost converter, the
obtained results are also compared in terms of time response
specifications and evaluation time. It is found that buck-boost
converter with stable CSPID controller exhibits better and fast
performance as compared to other controllers.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research has been supported by University of
Auckland Engineering Doctoral Scholarship Award.
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