A unified design for feedback-feedforward control system to improve regulatory control performance

The PID controller is widely used in industries because of its simplicity and robustness. A simple approach to improve regulatory control performance is to combine both feedback PID and feedforward controllers. The feedforward controller enables early compensation of a measured disturbance before it can seriously affect the process. The conventionally derived non-ideal feedforward controllers are not often used in practice. The reason is that an ideal feedforward controller based on direct inversion of process model is often not physically realizable. Several non-ideal feedforward control designs have been proposed where some of them involve rather intensive tuning procedure to obtain good disturbance rejection. In this paper, we present a new systematic method for designing a combined feedback-feedforward control system. The proposed design method is easy to use and applicable to stable, unstable and integrating deadtime processes where the ideal feedforward controller is physically not realizable.