An Undergraduate CACSD Project: the Control of Mean Arterial Blood Pressure during Surgery*

An appreciation of the basic ideas behind the tuning of conventional proportional-integralderivative (PID) controllers should be a fundamental requirement of any introductory control course whether it is delivered in an Electrical, Mechanical or Chemical Engineering Department. This contribution presents a computer-aided control system design (CACSD) assignment that the authors use to teach students about system identification from process step-response data and subsequent PI/PID controller design using simple tuning relationships. The biomedical system considered here, namely the control of mean arterial blood pressure (MAP) in patients during surgery, embodies a number of interesting practical considerations that need to be taken into account when carrying out the control design.