Study on rotary valve system (RVS) for automotive engines has been carried out over many years. Recent researches have already successfully implemented the idea, but none of design can provide variable valve timing and flow area control simultaneously. Therefore, a RVS with variable valve control system is proposed in this paper. The system design and dynamic analysis of the proposed RVS are first presented. Moreover, the selection of the proportional, integral and derivative (PID) controller parameters for the valve control based on an emerging artificial intelligent technique, cuckoo search (CS), is also discussed. Experimental and simulation results show that the proposed tuning method is better than the traditional Ziegler and Nichols method, and the proposed variable rotary valve control system is feasible.