Design and performance of mid-ranging controllers

Mid-ranging control applications are multivariate and often involve input constraints. Although some strategies have been reported to work well in industry, no systematic comparison has ever been made. The purpose of this report is to compare these schemes to a model-based predictive control (MPC) approach designed specifically for constrained multivariable control problems. The results indicate that although there are special cases where the existing schemes work reasonably well, MPC is best able to solve the problem in the general case.