Control Engineering Practice 9 (2001) 1159–1161

Preface
PID Control

At the beginning of the new millennium the PID * 3 papers deal with new structure for ratio control,
controller continues to be a key component of industrial fault-tolerant control and PID controllers using
control. During the last century many different struc- smart actuator and fieldbus technologies.
tures of control have been proposed to overcome the * 2 papers reported PID control applications of power
limitations of PID controllers. Due to their simplicity hydraulic turbines, AC-motor drives or Optical disc
and usefulness they constitute a powerful solution to the drives.
control of a large number of industrial processes.
The present-day structure of PID controllers is quite
different from the original analogue PID controllers. The paper ‘‘The future of PID control’’ by K.J.
Now, the implementation of the PID is based on a Astro. m and T. Hägglund, Department of Automatic
digital design. These digital PID include many algo- Control, Lund University, Sweden, presents the state of
rithms to improve their performances, such as anti- the art of PID control and some reflections about its
wind-up, auto-tuning, adaptive, fuzzy fine-tuning. How- future. Particular issues discussed include specifications,
ever, the basic actions remain the same. stability regions, design, and performance assessment.
There has been a strong resurgence in the interest An evaluation of competing strategies, general linear
towards the PID control over the last few years. Many controllers, model predictive control and controllers
publications have appeared (see Fig. 1) (Bennett, 2000). based on state feedback and observers, gives the basis
Many of the new capabilities have been introduced by for discussing the future of PID control. Deciding issues
the research community. The industrial control users are performance, tuning, maintenance and particularly
easily, and sometimes enthusiastically, apply these ease of use.
innovations. The PID control has become one of the The first paper on new procedures for PID tuning is
most important ways, for the scientific and the industrial ‘‘PID-deadtime control of distributed processes’’ by
control users to work together. F.G. Shinskey, Process Control Consultant, USA. The
In 2000 an IFAC Workshop on Digital Control was performances of PID controllers having time-delay
held in Terrassa (Barcelona, Spain) to analyse the PID compensation are compared with respect to other
history, the evolution of PID, the benefits and draw- structures, such as the internal model control or
backs of PID control applications. New tuning rules and conventional PID control for distributed lag processes.
auto-tuning techniques were presented in the Workshop. The author gives three controller settings for optimum
The PID was also presented as a building block within load regulation (Integral Absolute Error) of distributed
more complex controllers, such as non-linear or DMC processes. The PID-Deadtime controller is then success-
controllers. Software packages for optimal PID control fully applied to the temperature control of superheaters
design were the subject of some papers. The scientific in a 500 MW power boiler in Ontario.
and technical level of more than 100 papers presented in The paper entitled ‘‘Optimal-tuning PID control for
this Workshop was in general high. The number of industrial systems’’ by G.P. Liu and S. Daley, from the
attendees, around 150 from 30 countries, was unusually Mechanical School of the University of Nottingham and
high for an IFAC Workshop. ALSTOM Power Technology Centre, Great Britain,
This Special Issue of Control Engineering Practice on presents the design of three optimal-tuning PID
PID control was initially based on 16 pre-selected papers controllers for industrial processes. These schemes are
of those presented in the Workshop. After a process of based on time-domain, frequency-domain and multi-
revision and improvement 10 papers were chosen: objective optimal-tuning design goals. They have been
successfully applied to three industrial processes: an
* 1 paper presents the state of the art of PID control hydraulic position control system, a rotary hydraulic
and discusses about its future. speed control system and a MIMO gasifier of an IGCC
* 4 papers include some contributions on PID tuning of power plant. The experimental results show good
industrial processes: SISO, MIMO, non-linear and/or performances of these optimal-tuning PID controllers
with dominant dead-time features. even though there are changes in the process dynamics.

0967-0661/01/$ - see front matter r 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 9 6 7 - 0 6 6 1 ( 0 1 ) 0 0 0 6 1 - 2
1160 Preface / Control Engineering Practice 9 (2001) 1159–1161

bleaching process. Constant-gain and adaptive version

of the proposed blend station are described in the paper.
The paper ‘‘Fault-tolerant PID controllers using a
passive robust fault diagnosis approach’’ by V. Puig and
J. Quevedo from the Automatic Control Department of
Polytechnical University of Catalonia, Spain, presents a
complete scheme of fault-tolerant control. The paper
describes an analytical redundancy method to detect
faults in the process on real time. When a fault occurs a
robust fault diagnosis module, named DMP, is used for
Fig. 1. PID publications historical evolution in the last 30 yr. residual generation and decision making in order to find
out the location of the faults and finally, from the
analysis of the system recoverability, a supervisor system
‘‘Robust tuning procedures of dead-time compensat- activates accommodation actions to get a fault-tolerant
ing controllers’’ by A. Ingimundarson and T. H.agglund system. The proposed methodology has been success-
from the Automatic Control Department of the Lund fully applied to two interconnected tanks where a level
Institute of Technology, Sweden, describes new tuning sensor fault has been simulated. The fault-tolerant PID
procedures for dead-time controllers for real processes detects a fault, isolates the fault in the level sensor and,
which are described by first-order plus dominant dead- in order to close the loop, changes the measure of the
time models and by two-parameter integrating models. sensor by an estimator.
An identification method based on experimental results The paper, ‘‘PID control for a distributed system with
in open and closed loop is used. The dead-time a smart actuator’’ by D. Lee, J. Allan, A. Thompson
controllers presented in this paper are based on some and S. Bennett from Rolls-Royce University Technol-
extension of the well-known Smith Predictor. This study ogy Centre and Automatic Control Department of
deals with the design of automatic tuning procedures for Sheffield University, Great Britain, describes how a
these dead-time controllers applied to stable and smart actuator technology can improve the PID control
unstable processes. An analysis of the sensitivity to performances in the presence of undesirable actuator
dead-time errors is also included. Finally, the methodol- characteristics. The proposed smart actuator is imple-
ogy has been successfully applied to a tank laboratory mented using an add-on intelligence, CAN bus and an
process. actuator rig. The smart actuator is applied to on-line
The paper ‘‘Mobile robot path tracking using a robust PID controller retuning using a distributed architecture
PID controller’’ by J.E. Normey-Rico from the Dept. de demonstrator to counteract degraded actuator perfor-
Automaçao e Sistemes of Federal University of Santa mances.
Catarina, Brazil, I. Alcal!a, J. Go! mez-Ortega and E.F. The first paper of PID control applications is ‘‘Digital
Camacho from the Dep. Ingenier!ıa de Sistemas y servo IC for optical disc drives’’ by T.H. Akkermans
Autom!atica, University of Sevilla, Spain, deals with a and S.G. Stan from Philips Optical Storage, The
methodology for tuning PID controllers. The structure Netherlands. This paper deals with several control
of the PID controllers includes a reference filter for problems in high and very high-speed optical disc
stable processes and a cascade loop with a proportional drives. The conventional PID controllers are not only
gain for integrating processes. The parameters of the useful in the disc standards for reference purposes but
controllers are tuned using the root locus method, also to properly control the laser spot in focus and on
looking for quick response without oscillations. The track. The paper presents a fully programmable servo
robust performances of this methodology are also integrated circuit implementation to perform the men-
analysed. Finally, it has been applied to a mobile robot tioned control task and it describes the functionality and
path tracking problem and the experimental results the advantages of using the proposed control architec-
show good performance in spite of delay estimation ture for optical disc drives.
uncertainties. Finally, the paper entitled, ‘‘Dynamic model reference
The next paper proposes a new structure for ratio PI control of permanent magnet AC motor drives’’ by
control to overcome the poor performances of the P. Stewart and V. Kadirkamanathan from the Auto-
classical ratio control structure during transients caused matic Control and System Engineering Department of
by setpoint changes. The title of this paper is ‘‘The blend Sheffield University, describes the application of PI
station. a new ratio control structure’’ by T. H.agglund current controllers to permanent magnet AC motor
from the Automatic Control Department, Lund In- drives. A non-linear model reference scheme including
stitute of Technology. The suggested Blend station the constraints of the system has been used in this
demonstrates the improved performances during tran- application. Two PI current regulators allow to track
sients through simulations as well as applied to a pulp the non-linear model reference command values in order
 Preface / Control Engineering Practice 9 (2001) 1159–1161 1161

to achieve an optimal torque speed trajectory. The References

proposed algorithm has been implemented on an
experimental dynamometer test rig. The results maintain Bennett, S., (2000). The past of PID controllers. Proceedings Volume of
proper control of the current vector at all times Digital Control: Past, Present and Future of PID Control IFAC
Workshop, Pergamon Elsevier Science, Great Britain, pp. 1–11.
throughout the operating range of the AC motor. ISBN 0-08-043624 2.
We hope that the readers will find the papers
presented in this special issue of interest for them. This Karl J. Åstro. m
selection of PID control papers shows that nowadays it Department of Automatic Control,
is possible to contribute to the improvement of control Lund University, Lund, Sweden
science using PID control structures. It is also very
important to know that any improvement on PID Pedro Albertos
control performances can have a huge impact in the Department of Automatic Control,
industrial society due to the high degree of its use in Polytechnical University of Valencia,
industrial processes. Valencia, Spain
We would like to thank all the contributing authors
and many reviewers. In fact we had a very difficult task Joseba Quevedo
to select only 10 papers out of over 100 preliminary Department of Automatic Control,
papers presented in PID’00 IFAC Workshop. Finally, Polytechnical University of Catalonia UPC,
we would also like to thank Prof. George Irwin, CEP Campus de Terrassa, C/Colom. 11 08222,
Editor-in chief and his staff for their encouragement and Terrassa, Barcelona, Spain
assistance on this PID special issue. E-mail address: [email protected]