Comparison of Model Reference Adaptive Control and Sliding Mode Control for multi-drug infusion to regulate hemodynaic variables

Cardiac output (CO) and Mean Arterial Pressure (MAP) are two important measures of the health and function of the cardiovascular system. In normal conditions the cardiovascular system must maintain these hemodynamic variables at desired levels in order for blood to be delivered to all of the organs and tissues, otherwise, which cause lack of adequate perfusion of nurishing blood, heart stroke etc. When this natural control mechanism become insufficient or improper, we need to go for an external medical intervention through drugs. As the manual intervention of drugs are prone to error, an automatic control systems are necessary. In this work, two controllers are designed to regulate CO and MAP using a vasodilator drug Sodium Nitroprusside (SNP) and an inotropic drug Dopamine (DPM). The first approach is a Model Reference Adaptive Controller (MRAC). This is designed based on Lyapunov stability method which account for plants with uncertain model parameters. The second approach is a Sliding Mode Controller (SMC) that account for robustness towards set-point variations and disturbances in the system. These controllers are then evaluated through simulations conducted in MATLAB and the results are compared.