Decentralised control of a quadruple tank plant with a decoupled event-based strategy

In this work we focus on the development of a software tool, which allows users to perform experiments with event-based PI controllers in a multivariable system composed of four coupled tanks. The quadruple tank plant allows the student of control engineering to experiment and obtain an intuitive knowledge about multivariable systems (systems with more than one inputs and more than one outputs), to study the differences between the minimum phase and non-minimum phase behaviours and the difficulties in control that arise in the latter case, and all this with the motivation that the experiments can be done not only in simulation but with a real plant. The control system provides the possibility of using a decoupling net between the controllers and the actuators, which can have a direct or inverse scheme, and which can be used to reduce the effect of the interactions between inputs and outputs. Finally, we present a set of results illustrating the possibilities of the application to investigate the performance of the event-based controller together with a decoupling strategy.