Editors note: The article Driving Plant Optimization with Advanced Process Control (in this issue) discusses when and how companies might want to create their own process models and control strategies. This is not for the faint of heart since it involves some highly sophisticated math processes that will likely test your ability to recall your academic training. If you want to test your chopsCONTROL ENGINEERING China版权所有, here’s an article from Peter GalanCONTROL ENGINEERING China版权所有, Ph.D., control engineer at JDS Uniphase, a manufacturer of fiber optic and other broadband communication equipment. His experience includes 35 years working with process control systems, roboticsCONTROL ENGINEERING China版权所有, and optical communication.
        The Quick Engineer’s Guide to Control System Design gives a very condensed (about 25 pages) description of what has to go on in an industrial process control systemCONTROL ENGINEERING China版权所有, beginning with the most basic mathematical foundations to PID and more sophisticated elements of advanced control, including feed-forward control, adaptive control, optimization, fuzzy logic, and more.

        An excerpt from the introduction:
        There is no need to stress the importance of control systems in any sphere of our life. We take them as something completely natural, but the control system designers are sometimes getting headaches while they succeed in their job, even though the basic principle of the automatic control seems to be so simple.
        Figure 1 shows the main components and variables of a generic closed-loop control system. It consists of the controlled system or plant and the controller. The purpose of the controller is to maintain output variable, y(t), at the level determined by reference input. This is accomplished by the subtraction of output variable, y(t) from reference inputCONTROL ENGINEERING China版权所有, r(t). The result is a regulation