A fast design technique for robust industrial controllers

This paper provides a new fast design method for robust industrial controllers via majorant systems in the frequency domain. The proposed methodology allows to establish several fast design techniques for a broad class of industrial controllers of plants with internal and/or external delays, parametric and/or structural uncertainties, and subject to disturbances, when an analytical model of the plant or data acquired from simple experimental tests are available. The provided design and control techniques are more general with respect to the Ziegler-Nichols ones and their numerous variants, which, in some cases, do not guarantee the control system stability. The used key idea consists in increasing the frequency response of the process to be controlled with the frequency response of a simpler system, also of order greater than one, with external delay, which allows designing, using simple formulas, controllers of PI, PID, PIDR, PI2, PI2D, PI2DR, PI2D2, and PI2D2R types. The designed controllers always guarantee stability margins larger than those of appropriate reference systems. Therefore, good performance of robustness of the stability and tracking precision of smooth references, with respect to parametric and/or structural uncertainties and/or smooth disturbances, are always guaranteed. The stated general methodology and various performance comparisons, also about the tracking precision of references with bounded first or second derivative, are illustrated and validated in several case studies, experimentally too.