Comparative Study of Various Controllers Improved by Swarm Optimization for Nonlinear Active Suspension Systems with Actuator Saturation

Abstract

The active suspension systems offer substantial benefits in ride comfort, handling control over traditional passive systems. In this paper, the evaluation of various controllers including the proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller and the state feedback (SF) controller on the dynamics performance of active suspension systems is presented. Unlike the majority of the previous studies, the nonlinearities and actuator saturation in the mathematical model of the suspension system have been considered for more reasonable representation of the real system. To attain a better performance of the two proposed controllers, a swarm bipolar algorithm (SBA) technique has been introduced to improve the searching process for the optimal values of the controllers’ adjustable parameters. The simulation results using MATLAB show that the proposed controllers exhibit a good performance in normal operation and in a robustness test involving system parameters’ changes. In terms of improving the response of the system, the SBA-PID controller shows a better response than that of the SBA-SF controller.