IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS—PART A: SYSTEMS AND HUMANS, VOL. 29, NO.
6, NOVEMBER 1999 587
Fuzzy Logic Based Set-Point
Weight Tuning of PID Controllers
Antonio Visioli
Abstract—In this paper, a novel methodology, based on fuzzy
logic, for the tuning of proportional-integral-derivative (PID)
controllers is presented. A fuzzy inference system is adopted to
determine the value of the weight that multiplies the set-point for
the proportional action, based on the current output error and
its time derivative. In this way, both the overshoot and the rise
time in set-point following can be reduced. The values of the pro-
portional gain and the integral and derivative time constant are
determined according to the well-known Ziegler–Nichols formula
so that a good load disturbance attenuation is also assured. The
methodology is shown to be effective for a large range of processes
and is valuable to be adopted in industrial settings since it is
intuitive, it requires only a small extra computational effort, and
it is robust with regard to parameter variations. The tuning of the
parameters of the fuzzy module can be easily done by hand or by
means of an autotuning procedure based on genetic algorithms.
Index Terms—Fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, PID controllers,
set-point weighting, tuning.
I. INTRODUCTION
It is well-known that, despite many sophisticated control
theories and techniques that have been devised in the last
decades, proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers are
still the most adopted in practical cases. In fact, due to
their simple structure, PID controllers are relatively easy to
tune and their use is well understood by a great majority
of industrial practitioners and automatic control designers.
In addition, they can provide acceptable performances for
a large range of processes, so that other controllers are
unlikely to achieve the same cost/benefit ratio. It is also
well-known that PID controllers are particularly adequate for
processes whose dynamics can be effectively modeled by
a first or second order system. Unfortunately, real systems
have, in general, significant characteristics such as high-order,
nonlinearities, dead-time, etc. and they can be affected by
noise, load disturbances and other environmental conditions
that cause parameter variations and sudden modifications of
the model structure. It appears how, in this context, the
tuning the controller parameters is a crucial issue. For this
reason, many tuning formulae have been proposed in the
literature [1] and they meet different requirements such as
set-point following, attenuation of load disturbance, rejection
of noise, and so on. Among the tuning methods, the most
employed in industrial settings is still the Ziegler–Nichols one
Manuscript received November 7, 1998; revised July 24, 1999. This work
was supported in part by MURST. This paper was recommended by Associate
Editor A. Kandel.
The author is with the Dipartimento di Elettronica per l’Automazione,
University of Brescia, I-25123 Brescia, Italy.
Publisher Item Identifier S 1083-4427(99)08768-8.
1083–4427/99$10.00  1999 IEEE
[2] which provides a good load disturbance attenuation but
also a large overshoot and settling time, so that the values of
the parameters are often subsequently refined in accordance
with the operator’s experience. In order to deal with these
situations, it would be useful to increase the capabilities of
PID controllers, without complicating their structure too much
and in such a way that the industrial knowledge would be still
fully exploited.
Fuzzy logic has been recognized to be very appropriate
in implementing the operators experience in the design of
control systems. Especially for this reason, it has been widely
adopted in the last decade [3], and some applications to PID
controllers have also been devised, in order to increase the set-
point following performances. Tzafestas and Papanikopoulos
proposed an approach in which the performance of the PID is
enhanced by slightly changing the values of the proportional,
integral and derivative coefficients (which are determined by
classical tuning procedures) on the basis of a fuzzy matrix that
contains, in condensed rule form, the experience of a human-
controller [4]. He et al. devised a methodology that consists
of parameterizing a Ziegler–Nichols-like formula by a single
parameter and then self-tuning this parameter by means of an
on-line fuzzy inference mechanism [5]. Zhao et al. developed
a fuzzy gain scheduling scheme where PID parameters are
determined on the basis of fuzzy rules, depending on the value
of the error signal and its time derivative or difference [6].
However, for these approaches, it is not clear how to set the
parameters of the fuzzy inference systems, and the complexity
of the resulting overall control scheme may increase in such a
way that they are no longer worthy of being used in practical
cases. Moreover, their effectiveness in attenuating the load
disturbances has not been shown.
In this paper, a novel methodology based on the fuzzification
of the set-point weighting is presented. The idea of multiplying
the set-point value for the proportional action by a constant
parameter less than one is effective in reducing the overshoot
but has the drawback of increasing the rise time. To achieve
both the aims of reducing the overshoot and decreasing the
rise time, a fuzzy module can be used to modify the weight
depending on the current output error and its time derivative.
The three classical parameters of the PID are tuned according
to the Ziegler-Nichols method, so that a good load disturbance
attenuation is assured. The parameters of the fuzzy module
can be easily tuned by hand, since the action it provides is
intuitive, or an automatic tuning procedure can be implemented
by means of genetic algorithms, which have already been
demonstrated to be effective in the tuning of the parameters
of the fuzzy inference systems [7].
588 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS—PART A: SYSTEMS AND HUMANS, VOL. 29, NO. 6, NOVEMBER 1999
Fig. 1. The 2 DOF scheme of the PID controller with set-point weighting.
The paper is organized as follows. In Section II the overall
methodology is presented and in Section III a practical tuning
procedure is proposed. The genetic algorithms based autotun-
ing procedure is exposed in Section IV. Simulation results are
presented in Section V, whilst a detailed discussion is provided
in Section VI. Conclusions are drawn in the last section.
II. PID TUNING WITH FUZZY SET-POINT WEIGHTING
The PID controller has the following well-known standard
form in the time domain
(1)
where
system error;
control variable;
proportional gain;
derivative time constant;
integral time constant.
We can also write (1) as
(2)
where it is obviously and The
typical tuning problem consists of selecting the values of
these three parameters, and many different methods have been
proposed in the literature in order to meet different control
specifications such as set-point following, load disturbance
attenuation, robustness with respect to model uncertainties and
rejection of measurement noise. Using the Ziegler–Nichols
formula generally results in a good load disturbance atten-
uation but also in a large overshoot and settling time for a
step response, that might not be acceptable for a number of
processes. Increasing the analog gain generally highlights
these two aspects. An effective way to cope with this problem
is to weight the set-point for the proportional action by means
of a constant [1] so that we get
(3)
where In this way a simple two-degrees
of freedom scheme is implemented; one part of the controller
is devoted to the attenuation of load disturbances, and the
other to the set-point following as shown in Fig. 1, where the
Fig. 2. Overall control scheme of the PID with fuzzy set-point weighting.
Fig. 3. Membership functions for the two inputs e and e_ of the fuzzy
inference system.
Fig. 4. Membership functions for the output f of the fuzzy inference system.
following transfer functions are indicated:
However, the use of set-point weighting generally leads to
an increase in the rise time since the effectiveness of the
proportional action is somewhat reduced. This significant
drawback can be avoided by using a fuzzy inference system to
determine the value of the weight depending on the current
value of the system error and its time derivative The
idea, in a few words, is simply that has to be increased when
the convergence of the process output to has to be
speeded up, and decreased when the divergence trend of
from has to be slowed down. For the sake of simplicity,
the methodology is implemented in such a way that the output
of the fuzzy module is added to a constant parameter
resulting in a coefficient that multiplies the set-point. The
overall control scheme is shown in Fig. 2.
The two inputs of the fuzzy inference system, the system
error and its derivative are scaled by two coefficients,
and respectively, in order to match the range on
which the membership functions are defined. Five triangular
membership functions (see Fig. 3) are defined for each input
while nine triangular membership functions (see Fig. 4) over
the range are defined for the output, which is scaled
by a coefficient The rule matrix (Fig. 5) is based on the
Macvicar–Whelan matrix [8]. The meaning of the linguistic
variables is explained in Table I.
VISIOLI: SET-POINT WEIGHT TUNING OF PID CONTROLLERS
Fig. 5. Basic rule table of the fuzzy inference system.
TABLE I
MEANING OF THE LINGUISTIC VARIABLES IN THE FUZZY INFERENCE SYSTEM
III. PRACTICAL TUNING PROCEDURE
Having determined the value of the three parameters
and by means of the Ziegler–Nichols step response or fre-
quency response method, it remains to assign the values of the
other parameters and and subsequently to
modify the peak values of the membership functions and the
rules according to the typical practical procedure for the fuzzy
controllers [9]. The value of can simply be chosen as the
inverse of the amplitude of the step of the set-point. For the
others, a practical procedure is to set and then keep
increasing the value of (starting from while
accordingly modifying the value of in order to normalize
the input as long as the performance improves. Then, this
procedure can be iterated with decreasing values of until
no better results are achieved. At the end, the peak values of
the membership functions have to be tuned, especially to limit
oscillations of the system output, by increasing the action of
the fuzzy module when the output of the system is close to
the set-point but its derivative is still high. Finally, the rules
may also be modified to improve the response, although often
in practical cases this is not necessary.
IV. GENETIC ALGORITHMS BASED AUTOTUNING PROCEDURE
By automatic tuning we generally mean a method where the
controller is tuned automatically on demand from a user (one
shot tuning) [1]. This functionality is important in an industrial
environment and it has been implemented in many commercial
controllers, although it is not always used in practice. Genetic
algorithms [10] have been recently successfully adopted in the
optimization of fuzzy controllers (see, e.g., [7]). The idea is to
search for the optimal values of the parameters of the fuzzy
589
Fig. 6. Example of a vertex translation for the two inputs of the fuzzy
inference system.
module, with respect to a determined objective function. In the
case of the fuzzification of the set-point weight, having fixed
the value of equal to the inverse of the amplitude of the
step of the set-point, we search for the values of
and the position of the membership functions in order to
minimize the value of the integrated absolute error
(4)
Specifically, we search for the optimal position of all the peaks
of the membership functions but keep the extreme and the
central ones fixed for the sake of simplicity. The vertexes of the
bases are accordingly translated, as shown in Fig. 6. In order to
limit the search space, we can impose the symmetry between
the membership functions around zero, both for the two inputs
and the output. The procedure consists of evaluating a series
of step responses in order to permit the genetic algorithm
to converge to the optimal solution. By choosing a suitable
upper bound for the value of and a suitable lower bound
for the value of (which can be simply and empirically
evaluated), it is guaranteed, from a practical point of view, that
the system will never be unstable. It has to be stressed that the
rigorous study of the stability for a general fuzzy based control
system is a very hard task and it is still an open problem in
the literature. However, from a practical point of view, the
problem can be addressed with the presence of a supervisor
which is able to detect an unstable response [11] and take
the necessary corrective actions (for example, set the control
variable to zero) [6].
Finally, it is worth stressing that by choosing other objective
functions, different design specifications can be satisfied, e.g.,
a step response with the minimum overshoot can be obtained.
V. SIMULATION RESULTS
Five groups of systems, with different values for the pa-
rameters, have been chosen in order to test the effectiveness
of the methodology. The following transfer functions with the
indicated values of the parameters have been considered:
(5)
(6)
(7)
(8)
590 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS—PART A: SYSTEMS AND HUMANS, VOL. 29, NO. 6, NOVEMBER 1999

Fig. 7. Step response for G1 (s);  = 0:8: Fig. 8. Step response for G2 (s):

(9)
(10)

The unit step response was simulated with Matlab and

Simulink for all the processes. A comparison between the
responses obtained with the classical Ziegler–Nichols method,
a fixed value of the weight and a fuzzified was made by
evaluating the integrated absolute error (4). The value of the
fixed weight was calculated with a simple iterative procedure
as the value that minimizes while the parameters of
the fuzzy inference system were determined, according to
the procedure described in Section IV, by means of the
Genetic Algorithm Optimization Toolbox made by Houck Fig. 9. Step response for G3 (s); T = 10; L = 0:8:
et al. [12]. Specifically, the chromosome was encoded in
a real-valued string where the values of the floating point
numbers are within the variables upper and lower bounds
[13]. The normalized geometric ranking [14] was chosen as the
selection function while a combination of simple, arithmetic
and heuristic crossover was adopted as the crossover function.
Finally, the uniform mutation, nonuniform mutation, multi-
nonuniform mutation and boundary mutation were involved
in the genetic algorithm.
Plots of the step responses in the three cases are reported
in Figs. 7–12 only for few plants, for the sake of brevity. The
input step starts at It has to be noted that no saturations
have been set on the control variable in order to view the full
potentialities of the different control schemes. It is obvious,
looking at the results, that the use of the fuzzy weighting
results in a stronger action by the actuators. However, fixing
a saturation level implies only that the rise time increases, but Fig. 10. Step response for G4 (s):
the high performance of the response is preserved. In order
to see how the fuzzy inference system modifies the weight rise time decreases whilst the overshoot does not significantly
depending on the current system error and its time derivative, increase with respect to the fixed This can be deduced by
an example of the value of for the unit step response of examining Tables III and IV where the values of the overshoot
system is shown in Fig. 13. Note (%) and rise time (s) are reported for the three controllers,
that Resulting values of for all the considered respectively.
systems are in Table II. The lower value of the for the In order to verify the load attenuation capabilities of the
fuzzy set-point weighting scheme is due to the fact that the proposed controller, a step of amplitude equal to three was
VISIOLI: SET-POINT WEIGHT TUNING OF PID CONTROLLERS 591

TABLE II
VALUE OF I AE WITH ZIEGLER–NICHOLS TUNING ONLY,
USING A FIXED WEIGHT b AND A FUZZIFIED WEIGHT b

Fig. 11. Step response for G5 (s); L = 0:

TABLE III
VALUE OF OVERSHOOT (%) WITH ZIEGLER–NICHOLS TUNING
ONLY, USING A FIXED WEIGHT b AND A FUZZIFIED WEIGHT b

Fig. 12. Step response for G6 (s):

TABLE IV
VALUE OF RISE TIME (IN SECONDS) WITH ZIEGLER–NICHOLS TUNING
ONLY, USING A FIXED WEIGHT b AND A FUZZIFIED WEIGHT b

Fig. 13. Fuzzified weight b for G3 (s); T = 10; L = 0:8:

A comparison between the values of for the classic

added to the input of the different considered processes once
Ziegler–Nichols tuning and the fuzzy set-point weighting
the output had attained the steady-state value. Then, the
scheme is shown in Table V. Obviously, the presence of a
integrated absolute error was calculated starting from the time
fixed set-point weight does not alter the load disturbance
of application of the disturbance, i.e., the following index
performances obtained with the Ziegler–Nichols tuning. It
has been determined:
appears the nonlinearity due to the fuzzy set-point weighting
(11) somehow generally improves the load attenuation capabilities
of the PID controller.
592 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS—PART A: SYSTEMS AND HUMANS, VOL. 29, NO. 6, NOVEMBER 1999
TABLE V
VALUE OF IAEd FOR THE RESPONSE OF THE LOAD DISTURBANCE
USING ZIEGLER–NICHOLS TUNING ONLY AND A FUZZIFIED WEIGHT b
TABLE VI
VALUE OF IAE WITH ZIEGLER-NICHOLS PARAMETERS INCREASED BY 20%
VI. DISCUSSION
The use of the fuzzy set-point weighting, in conjunction with
the Ziegler–Nichols method for the tuning of the proportional
gain and the integral and derivative time constants, leads to a
significant improvement in the step response and preserves the
good performances in the attenuation of the load disturbance
assured by the Ziegler–Nichols formula. It can be shown that
the approach is also robust with respect to the controller
parameter variations, in the sense that the Ziegler–Nichols
parameters can be quite different from their nominal values
without impairing performances. As an example, the value of
in the case that all the Ziegler–Nichols parameters are
increased by 20% is reported in Table VI. It can be noticed
how the results are similar to the nominal case. It turns out that
the application of the methodology is further simplified, since
no great attention has to be paid in the initial tuning phase.
Moreover, the analog gain can be increased in order to
provide a better load disturbance attenuation.
Hence, the proposed approach seems to be particularly
appropriate to be adopted in industrial environments, since
it requires only a small computational effort, it is easy to
apply, intuitive, and robust. Furthermore, the fuzzification of
the weight can be easily excluded from the overall control
scheme by simply fixing when the operator has no
interest in applying it.
VII. CONCLUSIONS
A novel method based on the fuzzification of the set-point
weight has been proposed for the tuning of PID controllers.
The approach has been shown to be very effective in the set-
point following for a large number of processes, whilst the
load disturbance attenuation performances obtained by the use
of the Ziegler–Nichols formula are preserved or improved. The
devised control structure seems to be particularly appropriate
to be adopted in industrial settings, since it requires a small
computational effort, it is easily tuned and it is compatible with
a classical PID controller; that is, it consists of a module that
can be added or excluded without modifying the parameters
of the existing PID.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author would like to acknowledge an anonymous re-
viewer for providing a detailed correction of the paper.
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Antonio Visioli received the Laurea degree in electronic engineering from the
University of Parma, Parma, Italy, in 1995 and the Ph.D. degree in applied
mechanics from the University of Brescia, Brescia, Italy, in 1999. His Ph.D.
dissertation was on control strategies for industrial robot manipulators.
Currently, he is Assistant Professor of automatic control with the De-
partment of Electronics for Automation, University of Brescia. His research
interests include industrial robot control and trajectory planning, system
inversion based control and PID control.