The aim of this study was to investigate the paper tension controller for compound paper-yarn bag-making and printing all-in-one machine. According to the problem of tension control of the compound paper-yarn bag-making and printing all-in-one machine, combining the fuzzy adaptive PID control and particle swarm algorithm, a fuzzy adaptive PID tension controller based on cosine adjusting inertia weight of the particle swarm optimization algorithm. A set of optimal PID parameters were searched out using particle swarm optimization algorithm with cosine adaptive inertia weight to improve the accuracy of tension control. The simulation results showed that the response time of the tension control method was 0.25 s, and the maximum overshoot was 2%, smaller than the response time and maximum overshoot of other methods. Compared with the traditional PID control and fuzzy adaptive PID control, the controller designed had advantages such as quick response speed, stable control output and short setting time.