Vance VanDoren, consulting editor
Articles
Automation system integrator statistics for 2010
System integrators in the Control Engineering Automation Integrator Guide (AIG) specify the industries they serve, the geographic areas they serve, engineering specialties, product experience, corporate affiliations, and their professional affiliations. Statistics for the 2010 Automation Integrator Guide follow.
Automation Integrator Guide gets 2000th listing
Control Engineering Automation Integrator Guide, an online directory of automation system integrators, received its 2,000th listing on Jan. 8, 2009, from Project S.r.l., an automation system integrator located in Firenze, Italy.
Self-tuning controllers adapt
Adaptive control technology encompasses a wide range of mathematical and empirical techniques that allow a feedback controller to automatically update not only its next output, but its entire control strategy to accommodate changes in the behavior of the controlled process. Self-tuning controllers capable of adjusting their own proportional (P), integral (I), and derivative (D) parameters wer...
Ci Technologies introduces three new software tools, partners with IOTech
Ci Technologies
PID–The Basic Technique for Feedback Control
A feedback controller is designed to generate an output that causes some corrective effort to be applied to a process so as to drive a measurable process variable towards a desired value known as the setpoint. Shown is a typical feedback control loop with blocks representing the dynamic elements of the system and arrows representing the flow of information, generally in the form of electrical signals. Virtually all feedback controllers determine their output by observing the error between the setpoint and the actual process variable measurement. PID control A proportional-integral-derivative or 'PID' controller looks at the current value of the error, the integral of the error over a recent time interval, and the current derivative of the error signal to determine not only how much of a correction to apply, but for how long.