ICNPAA 2010: Mathematical Problems in
Engineering, Aerospace and Sciences

Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller is still widely used in control and aerospace engineering. All the aircrafts benefit from a PID controller in Autopilot Control System for Longitudinal and Lateral-Directional axes. The PID controllers are associated with their PID gains which can either be tuned manually or optimized by the methods like Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to get better control and enhancement in the performance. Particle Swarm Optimization is a powerful stochastic evolutionary algorithm that is used to obtain the global optimum solution in search space. This algorithm introduces mutation operator with adaptive mutation probability into the PSO algorithm as well as it replaces those particles which fly out the solution space with new generated random particles during the searching process. Here, PSO algorithm is successfully applied to Altitude Hold (AH) in longitudinal axis autopilot control of an aircraft. Our system is simulated by MATLAB programming based on Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm. Furthermore, the advantage of PSO algorithm in controlling parameters and performing the system is compared with traditional PID tuning method as Ziegler Nichols tuning rule. The results show good agreement and promising.