A unified approach to the design of advanced proportional-integral-derivative controllers for time-delay processes

A unified approach for the design of proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers cascaded with first-order lead-lag filters is proposed for various time-delay processes. The proposed controller’s tuning rules are directly derived using the Padé approximation on the basis of internal model control (IMC) for enhanced stability against disturbances. A two-degrees-of-freedom (2DOF) control scheme is employed to cope with both regulatory and servo problems. Simulation is conducted for a broad range of stable, integrating, and unstable processes with time delays. Each simulated controller is tuned to have the same degree of robustness in terms of maximum sensitivity (Ms). The results demonstrate that the proposed controller provides superior disturbance rejection and set-point tracking when compared with recently published PID-type controllers. Controllers’ robustness is investigated through the simultaneous introduction of perturbation uncertainties to all process parameters to obtain worst-case process-model mismatch. The process-model mismatch simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently affords superior robustness.