International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)

Volume 116 – No. 11, April 2015

Implementation of Fuzzy and PID Controller to Water

Level System using LabView

Laith Abed Sabri, Ph.D Hussein Ahmed AL-Mshat

University of Baghdad University of Baghdad
AL-Khwarizmi college of Engineering AL-Khwarizmi college of Engineering

ABSTRACT Using intelligent system like Fuzzy controller can consider an

The paper is about the water level control system which is effective ways to solve this problem Fuzzy controller have a
required in many industrial processes like water treatment logical of the human behaviour in make decision. And as
plant, the idea of the process is to keep the tank water level at result gives the better performance than PID controllers in
the desired set point. First we implemented the conventional terms of settling and rising, response time, overshoot and
proportional – integral - derivative (PID) controller to robustness [6, 7, 8].
eliminate the steady state error, then it was used Fuzzy logic In this paper, fuzzy and PID controller is designed and applied
controllers which gives more performance and stability. It is to the Water level system. Then the fuzzy controller is used to
noted from the results that the Fuzzy Logic controller is more make the system fast and stable.in result a comparison
enhanced than PID controller in which its no overshoot, faster between two controllers was presented.
settling time, better set point tracking and produced lower
performances like integral of time and absolute error (ITAE) 2. TANK MATHMATICAL MODEL
integral of time and squared error (ITSE),and integral absolute The tank system model can write in mathematical form by
error (IAE), integral squared error (ISE). relating the inlet flow of the tank Q in to the outlet flow Qout
Both PID and fuzzy controller are implemented using through drainage pipe using balance flows equation:
LabView software Q in – Q out ….… (1)
Keywords Where:
Proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller, Fuzzy
Controller, LabView A: Tank cross-sectional area
H: water level in the Tank.
1. INTRODUCTION
One of the basic problems in the industries is water level
controlling system. Level of liquid being an important process
parameter has to be maintained at the desired level for smooth
running of the process and for better quality products.All of
the process industries, water treatment plants, and nuclear
power plants be contingent upon controlling the level in tank
systems. It is vital for engineers work in these plants
especially control and mechatronics engineer to have a good
understanding to how the tank level controlling system work
and how the level control difficult is managed.
Most of the control performances in the actual design are
usually defined by overshoots, rising time, settling time,
steady state error, etc. [1, 2].
Proportional-Integral-Derivative(PID)controller is the simple,
reliable and accurate used in industrial feedback control loops,
Fig 1: Single tank water level system
PID controller can’t be used to control the complex system to
The level of the tank is the integration of the above equation:
get the better performance[3].
The engineers in the past was used the mathematical model of …….. (2)
the system to design a controller based on a linearized model
of real control systems , but the problem is that the response Beside if there is no pump sucking out the water from the
of complex and non-linearity of real process is hard to find by drainage pipe, the outgoing flow will be:
applying conventional control techniques (like PID controller) ……. (3)
some experiments appearance that the simple PID with
constant parameter not achieve response of level tank system Where a: Area of the pipe
[4, 5].
: The velocity of outgoing water
The SISO (single input single output) tank system is designed
according to the model in eq. (2). The mathematical block
diagram for the model in eq. (2) as shown in the Figure 2.

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 International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 116 – No. 11, April 2015

Fig 4: Front panel of tank level controlled by academic

PID
Fig 2: The block diagram of the tank level with an inlet
and an outlet flow

3. PID CONTROLLER DESIGN

The PID controlling jobs is to adjust the output at a level so
that there is no error (the difference between the sensing value
(SV) and the set point (SP)).
General architectural of PID controller is shown in Figure 3,
the error e(s) is the controller input and the actuator input is
the controller output u(s).
Fig 5: Block diagram in LabView program for PID
controlling of the tank
The block diagram below explain the component of the PID
controlling of the tank

Fig 3: Block diagram of PID Controller

The PID controller governing equation is:

…. (4) Fig 6: Schematic diagram for PID control

The PID controller output in terms of Laplace transform can According to PID controller’s simplicity and excellent
be written as: performance, it were used in more than 95 % industrial
processes at many applications. The PID controller can be
… (5) tuned by using off-line control methods as well as online
control methods. The control techniques of complex dynamic
Figure 6 show the schematic design for our system based in systems with nonlinear or time varying behaviour are very
LabView program, Figure 4 is the water tank system GUI difficult to determine the model of the process [9, 10].
(Graphical User Interface) with PID controller made by
LabView ,the user can change the set point which in this case 4. FUZZY CONTROLLER DESIGN
is like input value for control system , while the Figure 5 Fuzzy controller is able to summarize human knowledge of
present the Block Diagram (BD) for the system in LabView the system and integrate them to the laws of control.Fuzzy
control system design depending on (a) adjusting the fuzzy
input and output memberships (b) regular the rule base table
and (c) designing each of the four components of the fuzzy
controller as shown in Figure 8 [11,12].

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 International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 116 – No. 11, April 2015

Fig 7: Front panel of tank level process with fuzzy controller

Fig 8: Fuzzy controller architecture

Fig 11: Membership function for output Response
For our case the input variable for tank level control is error
e(t) and differential error e•(t) while The output (y) is the The relations between the inputs to output of the system are
control signal to the actuator. shown by the rule base in Table 1. Which show that for any
possible value of the two inputs, there is an output based on
Inputs and Output Subsets
the rules. Fuzzy rule consider an alteration between linguistic
Input1 (level Error): Negative High (NH), Negative (N),
control understanding of an expert and automatic control
Small (S), Positive (P), and Positive High (HP)
plans of an activator [13].
Table 1. The Rule Base
e
•
HN N S P HP
e

N HN N P HP HP

S HN N Z P HP

Fig 9: Membership function for error P HN Z N Z HP

Input 2 (Error Rate Level): Negative, Small, and Positive

The final step in designing fuzzy controller in LabVIEW

Program is using the test system as shown in Figure11 , in
which the response of the system can be enhance the rule base
of the fuzzy controller and adjusting the output value through
changing the range of the membership for input and output
values [14].
Figure 7 Show the GUI which implemented by LabView
while Figure 13.Present the Block Diagram with fuzzy
controller
Fig 10: Membership function for error rate
Output: Negative High, Negative, Zero, Positive, and
Positive High

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 International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 116 – No. 11, April 2015

(b)

3.5
Fig 12: Input/output relationship of the system 3

2.5

Level (m)
2

1.5

0.5

1036
0
74
148
222
296
370
444
518
592
666
740
814
888
962

1110
1184
Time (sec)
Fuzzy level PID
Fig 13: Block diagram of tank level adjusted with fuzzy
controller

5. RESULTS (c)
The PID controller is tuned, where the proportional gain Kp = Fig (14) (a) Response of PID controller, (b)) Response of
10, integral time Ti = 100 and derivative time Td = 10. Fig. fuzzy controller(c) comparison between PID and Fuzzy
8(a) represents the response of the PID controller which has controller in step response
settling time of 250 sec and rise time of 34 sec. overshoot
=11.2%and The response of fuzzy controller is shown in Fig. The comparison of transient responses such as overshoot,
14 (b) with setting time 105 sec and rise time 29 sec we settling time and rise time for the two controllers are shown in
observe that there is no peak value appeared in the curve so table 2.
there is no over shoot calculated.the water level controlled by
Table 2 Comparison of transient response
Fuzzy controller faster response with the more ability to reach
the stability than conventional PID controller which
assistances in increase the performance of the system. Rise
Overshoot % Settling
Type time
time (sec)
(sec)

PID 11.2% 250 34

Fuzzy No Overshoot 105 29

From the table 2 and Fig 14, it is observed that the fuzzy
controller has No overshoot like PID controller and take less
time to reach the steady state.

(a) The error indices such as (IAE), (ISE), (ITAE) and (ITSE) for
PID controller and fuzzy controller are compared in table 3.

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 International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 116 – No. 11, April 2015

Table (3) comparison of error indicated [3] Smith, C. A and Corripio .2006, A. B, “Principles and
Practice of Automatic Process Control”, 3rd ed., John
Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Type IAE ISE ITAE ITSE
[4] “Labview PID and Fuzzy Logic Toolkit User Manual by
national instrument”, 2009.
PID 0.362224 0.509354 9.453114 4.988225
[5] Zuo, X. 2010, “Liquid level control of water tank system
based on improved polyclonal selection algorithm and
Fuzzy 0.196873 0.235035 2.841599 1.603642 RBF network”, IEEE, 2nd International Conference on
Computer Engineering and Technology, Vol 2, p 528-
532.
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