Digital control design and implementation

Other than the simple discretization of continuous time controllers, digital controllers present specific characteristics allowing them to work in different operating conditions offering additional alternatives. The integration of control design and computer control implementation is crucial to achieve the best control performance: to consider the relevance of each control action, and consequently each control task; to modify accordingly their priorities and distribute the available computation time to each one; to reduce the delivery time interval for any control action or to balance the control performance degrading of all the control loops. The main contribution of this paper to the mini-tutorial on Advances in Sampled-Data Control Systems is to review the interplay between the discrete time control design and its implementation, and the main issues to be considered in actual discrete-time control applications will be discussed.