Proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers are the most adopted controllers in industrial settings because of the advantageous cost/benefit ratio they are able to provide. Despite their long history and the know-how gained from years of experience, the availability of microprocessors and software tools and the increasing demand for higher product quality at reduced cost have stimulated researchers to devise new methodologies to improve their performance and make them easier to use. Practical PID Control covers important issues that arise when a PID controller is to be applied in practical cases. Its focus is on those functionalities that can provide significant improvements in performance in combination with a sound tuning of parameters. In particular, the choice of filter to make the controller proper, the use of a feedforward action and the selection of an anti-windup strategy are addressed. Further, the choice of the identification algorithm and of the model reduction technique are analysed in the context of model-based PID control. Widely adopted PID-based control architectures (ratio and cascade control) and performance assessment are also covered. For these topics, recent contributions are explained and compared with more standard approaches. A large number of simulation and experimental results are provided in order better to illustrate the different methodologies and to discuss their pros and cons. Practical PID Control is a helpful and instructive reference for researchers, graduate students and practitioners in process control.
