A new and intelligent design method for PID controller with incomplete derivation is proposed based on the ant system algorithm (ASA).For a given control system with this kind of PID controller,a group of optimal PID controller parameters K*p,T*i, and T*d can be obtained by taking the overshoot,settling time,and steady-state error of the system’s unit step response as the performance indexes and by use of our improved ant system algorithm.K*p,T*i, and T*d can be used in real-time control.This kind of controller is called the ASA-PID controller with incomplete derivation.To verify the performance of the ASA-PID controller,three different typical transfer functions were tested,and three existing typical tuning methods of PID controller parameters,including the Ziegler-Nichols method (ZN),the genetic algorithm (GA),and the simulated annealing (SA),were adopted for comparison.The simulation results showed that the ASA-PID controller can be used to control different objects and has better performance compared with the ZN-PID and GA-PID controllers,and comparable performance compared with the SA-PID controller.