The controller, generally, is to be designed to optimize the system in somesence subject to some constraints. In this paper the method to determine the optimal parameters of the PI controller in the unity feed back control system is proposed. Here the sence of the optimal is to minimize the integral of the squared error under the constraints that the maximum absolute value of control input, maximum overshoot, rise time, etc., should be smaller than the pre-given values. In the analysis the traditional method and the state variable method are combined in order to reduce the computational procedures required in the design of PI controller. Therefore, the procedure proposed in the paper is usefully applicable to the controller system with a general second-order plant. Finally, the indicial response curves generated at the optimal state are compared with those of non-optimal state and the effectiveness of this method is assertained.