A decade of progress in iterative process control design: from theory to practice

One of the most active areas of research in the nineties has been the study of the interplay between system identification and robust control design. It has led to the development of “control-oriented identification design”, the paradigm being that, since the model is only a tool for the design of a controller, its accuracy (or its error distribution) must be tuned towards the control design objective. This observation has led to the concept of “iterative identification and control design” and, subsequently, to model-free iterative controller design, in which the controller parameters are iteratively tuned on the basis of successive experiments performed on the real plant, leading to better and better closed-loop behaviour. These iterative methods have found immediate applications in industry; they have also been applied to the optimal tuning of PID controllers. This paper presents the progress that has been accomplished in iterative process control design over the last decade. It is illustrated with some applications in the chemical industry.