Practical approach to mid-ranging control of double-unit actuating systems

The paper focuses on the problem of controlling a double-unit actuating system with a series of actuators. Based on the conventional mid-ranging control system (MCS) with two PI controllers, a robust step-by-step design and tuning framework is proposed based on the D-partition method to improve the cooperation between the controllers. Furthermore, a universal modification is proposed that can improve the MCS performance by adding a feedforward compensator. Both numerical and experimental tests are conducted to validate the introduced concepts. The locally produced results show quantitative improvements over conventional solutions, which in selected instances reach between 16 % and 26 %, according to the user-defined integral quality criterion.