Data-Driven PID Control Tuning for Disturbance Rejection in a Hierarchical Control Architecture

This work presents some guidelines for tuning PID controllers in order to increase robustness within a hierarchical control structure focused on load disturbance rejection, in which the process' mathematical model is unknown. The proposed structure consists in two control loops: an inner PID control layer tuned using only data collected from the process, whose set point signal is governed by an outer predictive control layer, with the purpose of increasing closed-loop performance and enabling the specification of constraints. Some simulation results are presented, in which it is shown that the appropriate tuning of the PID controller allows the outer loop to correctly predict the inner loop behavior and therefore provide better disturbance rejection than the data-based tuned PID alone. (C) 2018, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.