Proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers are the most popular control systems equipped in industries due to their simplicity, effectiveness, and functionality. In this article, an adaptive differential evolution (DE) algorithm is presented to tune controller parameters of PID systems. The proposed algorithm uses shift based parameter control and pseudo population reduction procedures. All algorithmic parameters of DE are adapted and no additional parameter is introduced. A set of three typical control instances is taken to study the performance of the proposed algorithm. Four recently reported DE algorithms are chosen as baselines. Through numerical experiment, it turns out that the proposed algorithm yields better performance than the four baseline DE algorithms. Moreover, the proposed algorithm has a better scalability and reliability than other test algorithms.