PID control system analysis, design, and technology

Designing and tuning a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller appears to be conceptually intuitive, but can be hard in practice, if multiple (and often conflicting) objectives such as short transient and high stability are to be achieved. Usually, initial designs obtained by all means need to be adjusted repeatedly through computer simulations until the closed-loop system performs or compromises as desired. This stimulates the development of "intelligent" tools that can assist engineers to achieve the best overall PID control for the entire operating envelope. This development has further led to the incorporation of some advanced tuning algorithms into PID hardware modules. Corresponding to these developments, this paper presents a modern overview of functionalities and tuning methods in patents, software packages and commercial hardware modules. It is seen that many PID variants have been developed in order to improve transient performance, but standardising and modularising PID control are desired, although challenging. The inclusion of system identification and "intelligent" techniques in software based PID systems helps automate the entire design and tuning process to a useful degree. This should also assist future development of "plug-and-play" PID controllers that are widely applicable and can be set up easily and operate optimally for enhanced productivity, improved quality and reduced maintenance requirements

Universal direct tuner for loop control in industry

This paper introduces a direct universal (automatic) tuner for basic loop control in industrial applications. The direct feature refers to the fact that a first-hand model, such as a step response first-order plus dead time approximation, is not required. Instead, a point in the frequency domain and the corresponding slope of the loop frequency response is identified by single test suitable for industrial applications. The proposed method has been shown to overcome pitfalls found in other (automatic) tuning methods and has been validated in a wide range of common and exotic processes in simulation and experimental conditions. The method is very robust to noise, an important feature for real life industrial applications. Comparison is performed with other well-known methods, such as approximate M-constrained integral gain optimization (AMIGO) and Skogestad internal model controller (SIMC), which are indirect methods, i.e., they are based on a first-hand approximation of step response data. The results indicate great similarity between the results, whereas the direct method has the advantage of skipping this intermediate step of identification. The control structure is the most commonly used in industry, i.e., proportional-integral-derivative (PID) type. As the derivative action is often not used in industry due to its difficult choice, in the proposed method, we use a direct relation between the integral and derivative gains. This enables the user to have in the tuning structure the advantages of the derivative action, therefore much improving the potential of good performance in real life control applications

On the Selection of Tuning Methodology of FOPID Controllers for the Control of Higher Order Processes

In this paper, a comparative study is done on the time and frequency domain tuning strategies for fractional order (FO) PID controllers to handle higher order processes. A new fractional order template for reduced parameter modeling of stable minimum/non-minimum phase higher order processes is introduced and its advantage in frequency domain tuning of FOPID controllers is also presented. The time domain optimal tuning of FOPID controllers have also been carried out to handle these higher order processes by performing optimization with various integral performance indices. The paper highlights on the practical control system implementation issues like flexibility of online autotuning, reduced control signal and actuator size, capability of measurement noise filtration, load disturbance suppression, robustness against parameter uncertainties etc. in light of the above tuning methodologies.Comment: 27 pages, 10 figure

A survey on gain-scheduled control and filtering for parameter-varying systems

Copyright © 2014 Guoliang Wei et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.This paper presents an overview of the recent developments in the gain-scheduled control and filtering problems for the parameter-varying systems. First of all, we recall several important algorithms suitable for gain-scheduling method including gain-scheduled proportional-integral derivative (PID) control, H 2, H ∞ and mixed H 2 / H ∞ gain-scheduling methods as well as fuzzy gain-scheduling techniques. Secondly, various important parameter-varying system models are reviewed, for which gain-scheduled control and filtering issues are usually dealt with. In particular, in view of the randomly occurring phenomena with time-varying probability distributions, some results of our recent work based on the probability-dependent gain-scheduling methods are reviewed. Furthermore, some latest progress in this area is discussed. Finally, conclusions are drawn and several potential future research directions are outlined.The National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61074016, 61374039, 61304010, and 61329301; the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province of China under Grant BK20130766; the Program for Professor of Special Appointment (Eastern Scholar) at Shanghai Institutions of Higher Learning; the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University under Grant NCET-11-1051, the Leverhulme Trust of the U.K., the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany

Analysis and Application of Advanced Control Strategies to a Heating Element Nonlinear Model

open4siSustainable control has begun to stimulate research and development in a wide range of industrial communities particularly for systems that demand a high degree of reliability and availability (sustainability) and at the same time characterised by expensive and/or safety critical maintenance work. For heating systems such as HVAC plants, clear conflict exists between ensuring a high degree of availability and reducing costly maintenance times. HVAC systems have highly non-linear dynamics and a stochastic and uncontrollable driving force as input in the form of intake air speed, presenting an interesting challenge for modern control methods. Suitable control methods can provide sustainable maximisation of energy conversion efficiency over wider than normally expected air speeds and temperatures, whilst also giving a degree of “tolerance” to certain faults, providing an important impact on maintenance scheduling, e.g. by capturing the effects of some system faults before they become serious.This paper presents the design of different control strategies applied to a heating element nonlinear model. The description of this heating element was obtained exploiting a data driven and physically meaningful nonlinear continuous time model, which represents a test bed used in passive air conditioning for sustainable housing applications. This model has low complexity while achieving high simulation performance. The physical meaningfulness of the model provides an enhanced insight into the performance and functionality of the system. In return, this information can be used during the system simulation and improved model based and data driven control designs for tight temperature regulation. The main purpose of this study is thus to give several examples of viable and practical designs of control schemes with application to this heating element model. Moreover, extensive simulations and Monte Carlo analysis are the tools for assessing experimentally the main features of the proposed control schemes, in the presence of modelling and measurement errors. These developed control methods are also compared in order to evaluate advantages and drawbacks of the considered solutions. Finally, the exploited simulation tools can serve to highlight the potential application of the proposed control strategies to real air conditioning systems.openTurhan, T.; Simani, S.; Zajic, I.; Gokcen Akkurt, G.Turhan, T.; Simani, Silvio; Zajic, I.; Gokcen Akkurt, G

On-line multiobjective automatic control system generation by evolutionary algorithms

Evolutionary algorithms are applied to the on- line generation of servo-motor control systems. In this paper, the evolving population of controllers is evaluated at run-time via hardware in the loop, rather than on a simulated model. Disturbances are also introduced at run-time in order to pro- duce robust performance. Multiobjective optimisation of both PI and Fuzzy Logic controllers is considered. Finally an on-line implementation of Genetic Programming is presented based around the Simulink standard blockset. The on-line designed controllers are shown to be robust to both system noise and ex- ternal disturbances while still demonstrating excellent steady- state and dvnamic characteristics

Model-Based Policy Search for Automatic Tuning of Multivariate PID Controllers

PID control architectures are widely used in industrial applications. Despite their low number of open parameters, tuning multiple, coupled PID controllers can become tedious in practice. In this paper, we extend PILCO, a model-based policy search framework, to automatically tune multivariate PID controllers purely based on data observed on an otherwise unknown system. The system's state is extended appropriately to frame the PID policy as a static state feedback policy. This renders PID tuning possible as the solution of a finite horizon optimal control problem without further a priori knowledge. The framework is applied to the task of balancing an inverted pendulum on a seven degree-of-freedom robotic arm, thereby demonstrating its capabilities of fast and data-efficient policy learning, even on complex real world problems.Comment: Accepted final version to appear in 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA

A Data-driven Approach to Robust Control of Multivariable Systems by Convex Optimization

The frequency-domain data of a multivariable system in different operating points is used to design a robust controller with respect to the measurement noise and multimodel uncertainty. The controller is fully parametrized in terms of matrix polynomial functions and can be formulated as a centralized, decentralized or distributed controller. All standard performance specifications like $H_2$, $H_\infty$ and loop shaping are considered in a unified framework for continuous- and discrete-time systems. The control problem is formulated as a convex-concave optimization problem and then convexified by linearization of the concave part around an initial controller. The performance criterion converges monotonically to a local optimal solution in an iterative algorithm. The effectiveness of the method is compared with fixed-structure controllers using non-smooth optimization and with full-order optimal controllers via simulation examples. Finally, the experimental data of a gyroscope is used to design a data-driven controller that is successfully applied on the real system