Auto-tuner: Tuning commercial PID controllers on demand in industrial environments

This work deals with the design of a real-time tool that tunes commercial PID controllers via communication interface. The designed software allows an easy integration of drivers that perform different communication protocols used by commercial PID controllers. The tool not only performs real-time tuning but it stores and monitors all signals involved and sends to the regulator the tuned parameters so it can control the process properly. Several auto-tuning methods have been implemented. The identification of the dynamic characteristics of the process can be made via “step response” or “frequency domain model”, and in order to compute the PID parameters from the process dynamics several formulas by different authors can be selected.