Aiming at the problems of low overall efficiency and poor control effect in the traditional PID controller parameter tuning method, an improved artificial bee colony algorithm is proposed, which introduces the mutation operator of the differential evolution algorithm into the search equation of the standard algorithm, and adds the adaptive adjustment parameter. This improvement can improve the convergence speed of the algorithm and enhance the local optimization ability, while balancing the global exploration and local development capabilities of the algorithm. Experiments show that the improved algorithm has obvious effect on parameter tuning optimization of PID controller.