Give us PID controllers and we can control the world
Tore Hägglund, José Luís Guzmán
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to emphasize the importance of PID control for our society in general and for the control engineering community in particular. To this end, we first equate the relevance of PID controllers with other inventions in history to remark how PID control has contributed to revolutionizing our world as the main ambassador of the automatic control field. Afterwards, the PID control resilience is provided by showing a brief historical evolution to realize its timely adaptation, and how nowadays it is much more than just the three terms; P, I, and D. Moreover, it is summarized how PID control has been demonstrated to be equivalent to other optimal control solutions and how the recurrent comparison with Model Predictive Control (MPC) is not necessary at all, as both control algorithms should be considered as complementary approaches. Finally, encouragements and suggestions are summarized to continue working on PID control topics.