From PID to MPC: Control engineering methods development and applications

Process automation systems are widely known to be a crucial element in processing plants. Power plants, chemical, petrochemical, oil refining, food, automotive and many other processes in industry are vast and complex, and said to be controlled by just a handful of major players worldwide. Computer control systems and control engineering methods are at the heart of all automatically controlled processes. Motivated by practical success of modern control engineering methods in many industrial process and consumer electronics products there has been an increasing amount of work on development of new methods based on new robust, adaptive methods, numerical optimization techniques, soft computing strategies, microcomputers, decentralized control structure and hardware embedded controllers realization. The paper presents current state and development of the currently most widely used control methods, structures, and their applications to different types of automated processes. The objective of the paper is to survey and compare performance of conventional controllers with several selected advanced controllers with regard to their advantages and drawbacks in industrial applications.