Fela Rizki Wardana

Concerning my undergraduate final project, I am to design a controller. First things first, let me share you a little bit of what I’ve learned about the process and methods for designing a control system. This post also serves as a parameter for my progress documentation of the project.

The process of designing a control system usually makes many demands of the engineer or engineering team. These demands often emerge in step by step design procedure as follows:

1. Study the system (plant) to be controlled and obtain initial information about the control objectives.
2. Model the system and simplify the model, if necessary.
3. Analyze the resulting model; determine its properties.
4. Decide which variable are to be controlled (controlled outputs).
5. Decide on the measurements and manipulated variables: what sensors and actuators will be used and where will they be placed?
6. Select the control configuration.
7. Decide the type of the controller to be used.
8. Decide on performance specifications, based on the overall control objectives.
9. Design a controller.
10. Analyze the resulting controlled system to see if the specifications are satisfied: and if they are not satisfied, modify the specifications or the type of controller.
11. Simulate the resulting controlled system, either on a computer or a pilot plant.
12. Repeat from step 2, if necessary. ^^
13. Choose hardware and software and implement the controller.
14. Test and validate the control system, and tune the controller on-line, if necessary.

As you can see above, those are the procedures of designing a control system. If you are to design a controller, the easiest way to fulfil your objectives is to make a checklist out of the above requirements, and just make your way up through all of the lists above until, say you want to implement the control system into hardware, then you would have to do it completely until number 14.

The limitation and parameter I made in my project is only to simulate the resulting control system on a software such as Matlab®, so I would just need to pave my way up to number 11, and voila!

That’s it from me, thank you and see you later!

NB: the process of designing a control system above is taken from the book  “MULTIVARIABLE FEEDBACK CONTROL: Analysis and Design” written by Sigurd Skogestad and Ian Postlethwaite.