Networked PID control: Tuning and outage compensation

This paper deals with architecture and algorithm design of networked control systems (NCSs) to cope with network outages. A Networked PID controller and an internal model control based tuning scheme is proposed, using the jitter margin to ensure stability despite dropped packets. For longer periods of disconnection, an outage heuristic is proposed. The control design and outage heuristic need only the step response of the process and is as such simple to apply in practice. The effect of these outages on the stability and performance of the closed-loop control system are evaluated, and compared with alternative schemes via extensive simulations. The simple Networked PID with the outage heuristic is shown to perform well, compared to other techniques proposed in the NCS literature.