Improving disturbance rejection of PID controllers by means of the magnitude optimum method

The magnitude optimum (MO) method provides a relatively fast and non-oscillatory closed-loop tracking response for a large class of process models frequently encountered in the process and chemical industries. However, the deficiency of the method is poor disturbance rejection performance of some processes. In this paper, disturbance rejection performance of the PID controller is improved by applying the“disturbance rejection magnitude optimum” (DRMO) optimisation method, while the tracking performance has been improved by a set-point weighting and set-point filtering PID controller structure. The DRMO tuning method requires numerical optimisation for the calculation of PID controller parameters. The method was applied to two different 2-degrees-of-freedom PID controllers and has been tested on several different representatives of process models and one laboratory set-up. A comparison with some other tuning methods has shown that the proposed tuning method, with a set-point filtering PID controller, is quite efficient in improving disturbance rejection performance, while retaining tracking performance comparable with the original MO method.