Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer and Communication Engineering 2008

May 13-15, 2008 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Objective Function Selection of GA-Based PID Control Optimization for Automatic Gantry Crane
Mahmud Iwan Solihin, Wahyudi, M.A.S. Kamal, Ari Legowo Intelligent Mechatronics System Research Lab. Department of Mechatronics Engineering International Islamic University Malaysia. P.O. Box 10. 50728. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. wahyudi@iiu.edu.my (corresponding author) Abstract
Gantry cranes are widely used in various applications to transfer a payload from one position to desired position. Gantry crane system is an underactuated system where the number of inputs is less than the number of outputs. When the input signal is given to the actuator, the trolley starts to accelerate whilst causing a swing of payload hanging on a flexible cable. Many researchers have proposed antiswing controls of gantry crane using PID+PD structure where PID controller is used for trolley positioning control and PD controller is used to dampen the swing oscillation. This is because of the simplicity of PID control structure. Some have combined intelligent methods such as fuzzy and neural networks to improve the performance of the proposed PID control structure. This paper discusses GA-based PID+PD controller tuning for automatic gantry crane system. The discussion is emphasized on the selection of the objective function since the objective function is the key to use the GA (genetic algorithm). The optimized PID gains would be mainly due to the appropriate objective/fitness function. The simulation results show that a good anti-swing control performance can be obtained from the proposed objective function. I. INTRODUCTION Gantry cranes are commonly used in many applications such as transporting heavy loads and hazardous materials in shipyards, factories, nuclear installations, and high building constructions. The trolley of the crane should move the load as fast as possible without causing any excessive payload swing at the desired position. However, most of the common gantry crane results in a swing motion when payload is suddenly stopped after a fast motion [1]. The swing motion can be reduced but it will be time-consuming i.e. reducing the productivity. Moreover, the gantry crane needs a skilful operator to control manually based on his or her experiences to stop the swing immediately at the right position. Furthermore to unload, the operator has to wait the load stops from swaying. The failure of controlling crane also might cause accident and may harm people and surroundings. Various attempts of anti-swing control for automatic gantry crane have been proposed. Singhose et al. [2] and Park et al. [3] adopted input shaping technique which is open loop approach. However, these methods could not damp the residual swing angle well. Gupta and Bhowal [4] also presented simplified open-loop anti-swing technique. They have implemented this technique based on velocity control during motion. These are open-loop approach which is sensitive to parameters change of the system and disturbances. On the other hand, anti-swing feedback controls which are well known to be less sensitive to parameter variations and disturbances have also been proposed in some researches varying from conventional PID (proportional + integral + derivative) to intelligent approaches. The best-known controllers used in industrial processes are proportional-integralderivatives (PID) because of its simple structure [5,11]. Significant efforts have been put into PID research area for past years. Despite the advancements of control theory, the popularity of PID control design is still a challenge for researchers since its simplicity of implementations and broad applicability. Specifically, tuning method of PID controller for multivariable (non-SISO) system remains interesting. Many algorithms and methods have been developed to the design and tuning of PID parameters [6]. The Ziegler-Nichols tuning formula is perhaps the most well known tuning method for SISO. However, most of the proposed methods are applied for SISO system where the performance index used is common such as

978-1-4244-1692-9/08/$25.00 2008 IEEE

883

ITAE, IAE or ISE. It is sometimes not straightforward to design a objective function (performance index) for a system which is not SISO. Gantry crane system is an under actuated system belonging to SIMO (single input multi output) system. When the actuator receives input signal, the trolley starts to accelerate while causing a swing of payload hanging on a flexible cable. Thus, the objective function has to take into account the trolley positioning error and swing angle at the same time. This paper presents an offline tuning of anti-swing PID+PD controller using genetic algorithm (GA) to obtain the optimum controller performance. The objective function takes into account the performance of positioning error, swing angle and perhaps optimum control power. II. GANTRY CRANE DYNAMIC For simulation purpose, a dynamic model of 2-D gantry crane prototype is derived according to Lagrange equation. Fig. 1 shows the diagram of gantry crane mechanism where m1, m2, l, x, , B, g and F denote respectively the payload mass, trolley mass, cable length, horizontal position of trolley, swing angle, damping coefficient, gravitational constant and driving force. The equation of motion of trolley crane system is obtained as: &&cos m l & 2 sin + Bx & + m1l & = F (1) ( m1 + m2 )& x 1

m =

r x rp

(9)

The numerical value of the parameters used in the simulation is listed in Table 1. It is noting that the nominal value of some parameters mean the value used in the optimization, while those values may vary during the real operations (payload mass and cable length). The mathematical model of the whole system can be written as: &&cos & 2 sin ) (10) & + B1 & & + C1( V = A1 x x where:

A1 = B1 =

K e .r B.R.rp + rp K t .r R.rp K t .r ( m1 + m2 )

C1 =

m1 .l .R.rp K t .r

LIST OF PARAMETERS Parameter m1 m2 l g B R Kt Ke rp r Value 1 (nominal) 5 0.5 (nominal) 9.81 12.32 2.6 0.007 0.007 0.02 15 Unit kg kg m m/s2 Ns/m Ohm Nm/A Vs/rad m -

&& + & &. cos + g . sin = 0 l . x

(2)

The trolley is driven by DC motor. The dynamic of DC motor circuit is also included. & & + K e . (3) V = R .i + L.i m

Tm = K t .i
When L is neglected, Eq.(3) becomes:

m2 x

(4) (5)

TL

& V = R .i + K e . m
&& = T TL J m . m m r
TL r

Applying Newtons 2nd law of motion to the motor shaft, an equation is obtained as: (6) Figure 1.

m1

Trolley crane model

Since moment inertia of motor, Jm, is very small, then Eq.(6) can be written as:

Tm =

III. ANTI-SWING CONTROL The main purpose of anti-swing control is transporting the load as fast as possible without causing any excessive swing at the final position. Automatic gantry crane proposed by researchers use commonly two controllers for controlling both trolley position and swing angle of the crane payload. As no-swing motion of the payload is required, the structure of the feedback system for automatic gantry crane is shown in Fig. 2. PID controller is used for trolley positioning

(7)

with V, R, L, i, Tm, TL, Kt, Ke, m and r are respectively input voltage, resistance, inductance, armature current, motor torque, load torque, torque constant, electric constant, rotor angle position, and gear ratio. In addition, some equations related to rotational horizontal motions are (rp is radius of pulley): (8) TL = F .r p

884

control and PD is used for swing control. Thus, there are five controller gains to be optimized. Those five parameters are tuned by mean of GA as explained in the next section.

xref

PID (position)

x ++ GANTRY CRANE

PD (anti-swing)

Figure 2. Diagram of anti-swing control

arithmetic crossover are used here. The process continues until the population converges to the global maximum or another stop criterion is reached [9]. Number of generation is used as stopping criterion here. The chromosome comprising five genes represents a set of parameters Kp, Ki, Kd, Kps and Kds. Each parameter is bounded from 0 to 200. In this simulation, the optimum PID+PD anti-swing controller gains are optimized with a fixed population size of 100 for 100 generations as stopping criterion. The plant with nominal parameter (m1=1kg, l=0.5m) is run to reach 0.5m desired position so that an optimized controller gains is resulted when objective function is minimized. The 3rd order ITAE is used as model reference for trolley positioning [12]. This is defined as:

X ref
IV. GA-BASED ANTI-SWING PID OPTIMIZATION A. GA-based optimization GA is employed to optimize those five gains of anti-swing PID in offline using the obtained dynamic model. GA can be viewed as general-purpose optimization method and have been successfully applied to search, optimization and machine learning tasks [7]. Real-coded GA is adopted to avoid the enormous computation of encoding and decoding in binary GA. The computation is done with the use of GAOToolbox [8]. The common GA problem is composed of three operations: selection, crossover and mutation. In the beginning an initial chromosome population is randomly generated. The chromosomes are candidate solutions to the problem. Then, the fitness values of all chromosomes are evaluated by calculating the fitness function in a decoded form. Based on the fitness of each individual, a group of the best chromosomes is selected through the selection process. Here, normalized geometric selection is used. The genetic operators, crossover and mutation, are applied to this surviving population in order to improve the next generation solution. Crossover is a recombination operator that combines subparts of two parent chromosomes to produce offspring. This operator extracts common features from different chromosomes in order to achieve even better solutions. Mutation is an operator that introduces variations into the chromosome. This operation occurs occasionally with a small probability. It randomly alters the value of a bit, in case of binary coded GA. In real coded-GA it changes the entire value of a chromosome. Through the mutation operator the search space is explored by looking for better points. Uniform mutation and

X desired

3
s 3 + 1.75s 2 + 2.15 2 s + 1.5 3

(11)

where =1.5 is selected. This is related to the desired settling time of 5s. B. Objective function The fitness function is the key to use the GA [10]. The optimized result will be mainly due to the appropriate objective/fitness function. The objective of GA optimization is to minimize the error performance of the system. Here, the objective function must take into account the positioning and swing angle performance. While guaranteeing the fast response of trolley positioning, the swing must also be minimized at the same time. To achieve satisfactory positioning, ITAE (integral of time multiplied by absolute error) is used, while combinations of some others performance measures such as MSE (mean squared error), IAE (integral absolute error) is used to minimize the swing angle. Furthermore, weighted squared input signal may also be added to make the control signal efficient and it reaches the steady state smoothly. In general, the objective function has form of Eq.(12) or Eq.(13):

J = (a .Error( x ) + b.Error ( ))dt

0

t end

(12)

J = a .Error( x ) + b.Error( ) + c.V 2 dt (13)

0

t end

where a, b and c are the weighting constants which are experimentally selected. As initial those are selected as a=1 and b=1, while c is small value less than one. The aim of this paper is to evaluate some objective functions in order to obtain an appropriate objective function in anti-swing PID control tuning by simulation. Furthermore, the fitness function of the GA is made as inverse of the objective function with

885

penalty factor added to avoid division by zero. Thus, the fitness is designed to maximize:

Fitness =

1000 J + 0 . 001
V. EVALUATION RESULTS

(14)

achieved by minimizing objective function that combine ITAE (trolley position), ITAE or MSE (swing) and a small amount of squared input signal as shown by the simulation results. VII. FUTURE WORK However, the adjustment of weighting factors (a, b and c) can only be done by trial. The proposed objective function is not informative to the response of the system in time domain. Thus, further study needs to be done in order to design an objective function which is more understandable in time domain specification of the desired response for anti-swing controller tuning.

Some objective functions are evaluated by simulation. The obtained controller gains are used respectively to run the system for 10s with 0.5m desired position. As performance evaluation of the anti-swing controllers obtained by different objective functions, the same performance measure is defined as:

P = ( P1 + P2 )dt = (( x xref )2 + 2 )dt (15)

t0 t0

t end

t end

The results are presented in Tables 2-3. From Table 2, it can be seen from the value of P that only three objective functions, J1, J5 and J6, have a significantly smaller value compared to the others. The response of the system using the controllers obtained by these three objective functions is shown in Fig. 3. As a result, J5 and J6 produce the best anti-swing controllers where swing angle oscillation is minimal.
PERFORMANCE OF DIFFERENT CONTROLLERS Objective function by which Antiswing PID is optimized J1=ITAE(x)+MSE() J2=ITAE(x)+ITAE() J3=ITAE(x)+IAE() J4=ITAE(x)+MSE()+0.01sum(V2) J5=ITAE(x)+MSE()+0.001sum(V2) J6=ITAE(x)+ITAE()+0.001sum(V2) J7=ITAE(x)+IAE()+0.001sum(V2) Performance P1 P2 P 0.48 4.45 4.93 1.32 7.16 8.48 2.92 5.99 8.91 1.76 7.22 8.98 0.88 3.83 4.71 1.35 3.31 4.65 1.81 8.21 10.02

0.6 0.5 Position, m 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0.0 0 2 4 6 8 with J1 with J5 with J6 Time, s 10

(a). trolley displacement

0.10 0.05 0.00 -0.05 -0.10 with J1 with J5 with J6 0 2 4 Time, s 6 8 10

Swing, rad

(b). swing angle

Figure 3.

Responses for different controllers

OPTIMIZED PID GAINS BY GA Objective function J1 J2 J3 J4 J5 J6 J7 Kp 182.6 162.9 120.7 113.8 194.2 113.7 196.0 Anti-swing PID gains Ki Kd Kps 0.3 75.1 21.9 0.3 4.9 32.7 0.3 4.8 44.0 0.8 2.5 12.8 0.3 49.0 61.7 0.3 50.8 33.6 0.3 3.9 60.6 Kds 1.2 1.2 1.2 1.2 1.2 1.2 1.2 [1] [2] [3]

REFERENCES
Omar, H.M. (2003). Control of gantry and tower cranes, PhD Dissertation, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Blacksburg, Virginia. Singhose, W.E., Porter, L.J. & Seering, W.P. (1997). Input shaped control of a planar gantry crane with hoisting, Proceedings of the American Control Conference. pp. 97-100. Park, B.J., Hong, K.S. & Huh, C.D. (2000). Time-efficient input shaping control of container crane systems, Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Control Application. pp. 8085. Gupta, S. and Bhowal, P. (2004). Simplified open loop antisway technique. Proceedings of the IEEE India Annual Conference (INDICON), pp.225-228. Zhao, Z.Y., Tomizuka, M. and Isaka, S. (1993) Fuzzy Gain Scheduling of PID Controllers. IEEE Transactions on System, Man and Cybernetics. Vol 23, no 5,

[4]

VI. CONCLUSIONS Evaluation of objective function for GA-based antiswing PID controller optimization has been presented. Satisfactory performance of anti-swing control can be
[5]

886

[6] [7]

[8] [9]

Xu, J. and Feng, X. (2004). Design of Adaptive Fuzzy PID tuner Using Optimization Method. Proceedings of The 5th World Congress on Intelligent Control and Automation. Huang, P.Y. and Chen, Y.Y. Design of PID Controller for Precision Positioning Using Genetic Algorithms. (1997). Proceedings of the 36th Conference on Decision & Control, USA. http://www.geatbx.com/ea_matlab.html Pereira, D.S. and Pinto, J.O.P. (2005). Genetic Algorithm Based System Identification and PID Tuning for Optimum Adaptive Control. Proceedings of the IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics. USA.

[10] Liu, D., Jianqiang, Y. and Min, T. (2002). Proposal of GAbased two-stage fuzzy control of overhead crane. Proceedings of IEEE TENCON, IEEE Region 10 Conference on Computers, Communications, Control and Power Engineering. [11] Gondogdu, O. (2005). Optimal-Tuning of PID Controller Gains Using Genetic Algorithms. International Journal of Engineering Sciences. 11 (1), pp. 131-135. [12] Dorf , R.C and Bishop, R.H. (2007). Modern Control Systems. 11ed. Prentice Hall.

887