Performance monitoring of SISO control loops subject to LTV disturbance dynamics: An improved LTI benchmark

This paper is concerned with performance assessment of univariate control loops subject to time varying disturbance dynamics. The problem is motivated by the observation that most industrial controllers are linear time invariant (LTI) but the process, particularly the disturbance dynamics, is time varying. The time varying behavior of disturbance dynamics is modelled by piecewise constant parameters of linear disturbance models, namely linear time varying (LTV) dynamics. Thus, during a period of process operation, the process may be affected by several disturbances in terms of different disturbance dynamics or models. This problem has been previously solved by minimizing the variance of a most representative disturbance while satisfying a structured regulatory performance requirement for one of other disturbances, typically the transient but most significant disturbance. This leaves performance in regulating the remaining disturbances unspecified. In this paper, we formulate the problem as minimization of the sum of the weighted variances of all but one major disturbance that is considered under the structured regulatory performance requirement. Furthermore, the problem is solved from the following two perspectives: (1) Models of LTV disturbances are given, the limit of the achievable structured closed-loop performance of any LTI controller for the LTV disturbances is calculated, and the optimal LTI control law is derived if the process model is also known; (2) no complete models about the process or the disturbances are available except for the time delay of the process, an algorithm is developed to assess the performance of the existing LTI controller in the presence of LTV disturbances. Simulation and industrial examples are used to illustrate the proposed algorithms.