Revisiting the GPC for the Control of SISO/MIMO Dead-time Processes

Abstract

This paper studies a control structure based on the generalized predictive control (GPC) able to deal with SISO/MIMO dead-time processes. An equivalent dead-time compensator structure is presented in order to analyze the controller properties, such as set-point tracking, robustness and disturbance rejection. From the equivalent structure, a set of simple tuning rules are derived. Such rules employ a reduced number of parameters which facilitates the tuning of the controller, especially for the case of MIMO processes. A simulation result shows the enhanced performance of the tuning strategy when compared with an example from the literature. Furthermore, an experiment was performed to show the effectiveness of the proposed tuning strategy on the temperature and humidity control of an in-house thermal chamber.