Design of a performance-adaptive GPC-PI control system for controlling a weigh feeder

In the present paper, we discuss a new design method of a PI control system for controlling a weigh feeder. The PI parameters of a PI controller are based on generalized predictive control (GPC). Since the design parameters of GPC are selected in order to achieve a user-specified control performance, the PI parameters are adaptively updated such that the control performance is improved. In the proposed method, estimated plant parameters of a weigh feeder are updated only when the estimation error increases. Therefore, the control system is not updated frequently, and the control system is updated only when the control performance is sufficiently improved. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through numerical examples and experimental results.