Inter-Communicative Decentralized Multi-Scale Control (ICD-MSC) Scheme: A New Approach to Overcome MIMO Process Interactions

Decentralized PID control has been extensively used in process industry due to its functional simplicity. But designing an effective decentralized PID control system is very challenging because of process interactions and dead times, which often impose limitations on control performance. In practice, to alleviate the detrimental effect of process interactions on control performance, decoupling controllers are often incorporated into a decentralized control scheme. In many cases, these conventional decoupling controllers are not physically realizable or too complex for practical implementation. In this paper, we propose an alternative scheme to overcome the performance limitation imposed by process interactions. This new control scheme is extended from the SISO multi-scale control scheme previously developed for nonminimum-phase processes. The salient feature of the new control scheme lies in its communicative structure enabling collaborative communication among all the sub-controllers in the system. This communicative structure serves the purpose of reducing the detrimental effect of process interactions leading to improved control performance and performance robustness. Extensive numerical study shows that the new control scheme is able to outperform some existing decentralized control schemes augmented with traditional decoupling controllers.