In recent years, there has been a growing interest in real world application of heuristic methods. Memetic Algorithm (MA) is one of such effective heuristics. In this paper, we represent an efficient MA for determining optimal proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller parameters of an AVR system. This MA is developed by combining a competitive variant of Deferential Evolution (DE) and a Local Search method. The proposed method has excellent features, such as easy implementation, stable convergence characteristic and good computational efficiency. Fast tuning of PID controller parameters results in far better performance of the controller. Performance of our proposed algorithm is compared with other famous heuristics and the simulation results clearly indicate that our proposed approach is indeed more efficient and robust in improving the step response of an AVR system