This paper proposes a novel tuning strategy for robust proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers based on the augmented Lagrangian particle swarm optimization (ALPSO). First, the problem of PID controller tuning satisfying multiple H-infinity performance criteria is considered, which is known to suffer from computational intractability and conservatism when any existing method is adopted. In order to give some remedy to such a design problem without using any complicated manipulations, the ALPSO based robust gain tuning scheme for PID controllers is introduced. It does not need any conservative assumption unlike the conventional methods, and often enables us to find the desired PID gains just by solving the constrained optimization problem in a straightforward way. However, it is difficult to guarantee its effectiveness in a theoretical way, because PSO is essentially a stochastic approach. Therefore, it is evaluated by several simulation examples, which demonstrate that the proposed approach works well to obtain PID controller parameters satisfying the multiple H-infinity performance criteria. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.