PID control system analysis and design: problems, remedies, and future directions

With its three-term functionality offering treatment of both transient and steady-state responses, proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control provides a generic and efficient solution to real-world control problems. The wide application of PID control has stimulated and sustained research and development to "get the best out of PID", and "the search is on to find the next key technology or methodology for PID tuning". This article presents remedies for problems involving the integral and derivative terms. PID design objectives, methods, and future directions are discussed. Subsequently, a computerized simulation-based approach is presented, together with illustrative design results for first-order, higher order, and nonlinear plants. Finally, we discuss differences between academic research and industrial practice, so as to motivate new research directions in PID control.