Aiming at the nonlinearity and multi-disturbance problems of the electric regulating valve control system in the actual production process, a control method based on the improved ant colony algorithm to optimize the single neuron PID (proportional integral derivative) was proposed and applied to the valve opening control. The self-learning and self-adaptive ability of the single-neuron network was used to achieve the online tuning of PID control parameters. The improved ant colony optimization algorithm was adopted to optimize the learning rate and neuron ratio coefficients in the single-neuron PID, which effectively overcomed the shortcomings of the single-neuron PID where the learning rate and neuron ratio coefficients could not achieve the expected control effect due to the empirical setting. The simulation comparison results show that, compared with the traditional PID, single neuron PID, and single neuron PID based on ant colony optimization algorithm optimization of the three control methods, the control method proposed overshoots the amount of reduction of 10.2%, 6.1%, and 1.8%, respectively. At the same time, the regulation time is correspondingly shortened by 0.22s, 0.07s, and 0.03s. It shows a stronger adaptive and anti-interference ability, which can make the valve opening control more stable and reliable.