Proportional.Integral.Derivative control schemes continue to provide the simplest and effective solutions to most of the control engineering applications today. However PID controller is poorly tuned in practice with most of the tuning done manually which is difficult and time consuming. This research comes up with a soft computing approach involving Genetic Algorithm, Evolutionary Programming, and Particle Swarm Optimization and Ant colony optimization. The proposed algorithm is used to tune the PID parameters and its performance has been compared with the conventional methods like Ziegler Nichols and Lambda method. The results obtained reflect that use of heuristic algorithm based controller improves the performance of process in terms of time domain specifications, set point tracking, and regulatory changes and also provides an optimum stability. This research addresses comparison of tuning of the PID controller using soft computing techniques on Machine Direction of basics weight control in pulp and paper industry. Compared to other conventional PID tuning methods, the result shows that better performance can be achieved with the soft computing based tuning method. The ability of the designed controller, in terms of tracking set point, is also compared and simulation results are shown.