This paper intends to propose a performance adaptive-robust strategy for the design of control systems implemented on the industrial applications. This adaptive-robust control (ARC) strategy is taking into account both adaptive control advantages and robust control benefits and uses the same integral criterion for the process identification and for the control algorithm design. An optimal integral criterion and an appropriate measure for estimating the system performances' degradation due to variation of the dynamic model are used. The integral criterion is expressed in a direct form, through a cost function, defined in the model and the controller parameters' space. For the minimization of this nonlinear function, an adequate method of the mathematic nonlinear programming can be used. The theoretical approach presented in this paper is validated in simulation on a close loop control system. The mechanism of our approach is demonstrated on a simple numerical example; a companion application is being developed in Visual C.