A novel automatic method for multivariable process pairing and control

Pairing is the first step of decentralized controller design procedure in multi-input multi-output (MIMO) processes. In spite of considerable efforts dedicated to this problem, most of the known pairing techniques are offline algorithms and fail to decide when dealing with high dimensional and/or time varying processes and adaptive control applications. In this article, normalized effective relative gain array (NERGA) is introduced as an effective automatic pairing method and is employed in a new adaptive decentralized PID control strategy.