ROBEX: An Expert System for Robust Control Design

Process control engineers often experience difficulty in staying abreast of recent developments in control theory and are consequently unable to attain the expertise required to efficiently utilize most existing control design packages. This paper describes an interactive control design environment, the ROBEX system, in which users at all levels of expertise can benefit. Particular attention is paid to performance specification, which is potentially one of the more problematic aspects of control synthesis. ROBEX permits the specification of desired performance in a variety of formulations according to the user´s sophistication and will update this by processing qualitative user-evaluation of the simulated time domain response. The current implementation allows the user to generate a SISO design for a plant and its associated uncertainty description. Extensions are forseen to include more general process descriptions. The long term goal is the development of a package addressing the MIMO problem.