A control strategy based on tuning of a PI-controller with fuzzy sliding mode control, simulated annealing and particle swarm optimization has been implemented for a pH process. A fuzzy sliding-mode control is designed to enhance the robustness of system and to reduce the influence of time-varying disturbances. The study also includes simulated annealing to find out the global optimum solution. Simulated annealing has less reliability to fail on difficult functions because of its robustness. Hence, an efficient and reliable swarm intelligence-based approach, namely particle swarm optimization technique, to optimize the proportional and integral gains is also used. The simulation results show that the proposed controller outperforms the classical tuning in stability, convergence and robustness. The results obtained by various tuning algorithms are also described.