Polarization mode dispersion(PMD) is considered to be the ultimate limitation in high-speed optical fiber communication systems. Establishing an effective control algorithm for adaptive PMD compensation is a challenging task, because PMD possesses the time-varying and statistical properties. The particle swarm optimization(PSO) algorithm is introduced into self-adaptive PMD compensation as feedback control algorithm. The experiment results show that PSO-based control algorithm has some unique features of rapid convergence to the global optimum without being trapped in local sub-optima and good robustness to noise in the optical fiber transmission line that has never been achieved in PMD compensation before.