Ideal, Norma, Inverted
Ideal, Norma, Inverted
TRANSACTIONS
Abstract
  This paper presents a comparative study of simpli®ed, ideal and inverted decoupling. The stability, robustness and
implementation of the three decoupling methods are studied. The structured singular value (SSV) is used to carry out
some comparisons. It is demonstrated that robust performance and robust stability of a nominally stable control sys-
tem are equivalent for the three decoupling methods when the controllers are tuned to obtain identical nominal per-
formance. A relation is derived between the presence of right-half plane (RHP) zeros of a process in series with its
simpli®ed decoupler and the instability of the ideal and inverted decouplers for the same process. This paper also
describes a potential implementation problem related to the particular structure of the inverted decoupling. Finally, a
recapitulative table of the main advantages and limitations of each decoupling method is presented. # 1998 Elsevier
Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Decoupling; Robustness; Stability; Implementation
0019-0578/98/$Ðsee front matter # 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
PII: S0019 -0 578(98)00023 -8
266                             E. Gagnon et al./ISA Transactions 37 (1998) 265±276
systems applied to several distillation columns.            structured singular value, depicts this important
The distillation columns used came from the lit-            point. However, the three decoupling methods
erature [2,6,7]. They compared ideal decoupling             may not have the same nominal stability. In fact, a
and simpli®ed decoupling. However, to be able to            relation is established between the presence of
carry out direct analysis and comparisons with              right-half plane (RHP) zeros of a process in series
results already presented, they used the same               with its simpli®ed decoupler and the nominal
decouplers and controllers parameters as found in           instability of the ideal and inverted decouplers for
the literature. As in the preceding studies, they           the same process. A potential implementation
also concluded that ideal decoupling can be less            problem with inverted decoupling, which can
robust than simpli®ed decoupling.                           deteriorate performance, is also explained. It is
   In his book, Shinskey [8] detailed both simpli-          shown, with an example, that this problem can
®ed and inverted decoupling structures. He                  even destabilize the control system. Finally, this
explains why the initialization problem, which              paper summarizes in a simple table the main
consists in ®nding the right controller outputs             advantages and limitations of each decoupling
values to allow bumpless switches between the               method.
manual and automatic modes, is easier to solve
with inverted decoupling technique. He also
describes why it is much more easier to take into           2. Decoupling methods
account saturation of manipulated variables when
using inverted decoupling. Furthermore, it can be             Decoupling at the input of a two input±two
added that ideal decoupling presents the same               output (TITO) process P s requires the design of
de®ciencies as simpli®ed decoupling when analyz-            a transfer matrix D s, such that P sD s is a
ing initialization and saturation.                          diagonal transfer matrix T s:
   Simpli®ed and inverted decoupling methods are                                   
also described by Seborg et al. [9]. Referring                       D11 s D12 s
                                                            D s                    ;
respectively to Shinskey [8] and to Luyben [1],                      D21 s D22 s
Waller [3] and Weischedel and McAvoy [2], they                                           
concluded that inverted decoupling is appropriate                         P11 s   P12 s
                                                             P s                          and              1
to take into account the saturation of manipulated                        P21 s   P22 s
variables, however it is more sensitive to modeling                                          
errors.                                                                   T11 s      0
                                                             T s 
   Recently, Wade [10] discussed implementation                             0      T22 s
issues for the inverted decoupling method. In most
commercial distributed control systems (DCS), the
PID function block has an auxiliary input called            and
``feedforward input''. The feedforward input is
summed, within the PID function block, with the             P sD s  T s                                  2
output of the PID algorithm. Consequently, such
a PID function block is appropriate for direct              Fig. 1 shows a decoupling control system for a
implementation of inverted decouplers, allowing,            TITO process. The variables r1 and r2 are the set
without any programming, correct initialization,            points, c1 and c2 are the controller outputs, u1 and
which facilitates bumpless switches between man-            u2 are the manipulated variables and y1 and y2 are
ual and automatic modes.                                    the process outputs. The controller transfer matrix
   The purpose of this paper is to show that the            C s is diagonal and is de®ned as follows:
three decoupling methods present the same robust
stability and robust performance when the con-                                           
trollers are tuned to obtain equal closed loop                     C1 s  0
                                                            C s                                            3
nominal performance. An example, which uses the                     0    C2 s
                                    E. Gagnon et al./ISA Transactions 37 (1998) 265±276                                    267
The elements P11 s, P12 s, P21 s and P22 s of               2.3. Inverted decoupling
Eq. (4), which represent the transfer functions of
the process, are supposed to be known. The only                    To avoid the realization problems of ideal
unknown elements are T11 s and T22 s. They                    decoupling while keeping its advantages, an inter-
represent the desired dynamics of the decoupled                 esting method, found in Shinskey [8], consists in
system.                                                         modifying the decoupling structure of Fig. 1.
                                                                According to this ®gure and Eq. (4), when
2.1. Ideal decoupling                                           T11 s  P11 s and T22 s  P22 s, the manipu-
                                                                lated variables are:
   A ®rst decoupling control design consists in                                                            
selecting the transfer functions T11 s and T22 s.                                     P11 sP22 s
                                                                 u1 s  c1 s
The decoupling transfer matrix D s is then                                     P11 sP22 s ÿ P12 sP21 s
deduced from Eq. (4). The diagonal controller                                                                 7
elements C1 s and C2 s are independently and                                            P12 sP22 s
                                                                         ÿ c2 s
respectively tuned based on T11 s and T22 s. A                                   P11 sP22 s ÿ P12 sP21 s
logical choice for T s is T11 s  P11 s and
                                                                                                                     
T22 s  P22 s. With this choice, the same con-                                               P21 sP11 s
troller tunings can be kept even if one loop is set in           u2 s  ÿc1 s
                                                                                   P11      sP22 s ÿ P12 sP21 s
manual mode. However, this technique, called                                                                               8
                                                                                                                  
``ideal decoupling'' by Luyben [1], often leads to                                             P11 sP22 s
complicated D s expressions, which can be di-                            c2 s
                                                                                      P11   sP22 s ÿ P12 sP21 s
cult to realize.
                                                                It can easily be demonstrated (Appendix A) that
2.2. Simpli®ed decoupling                                       these equations can be simpli®ed as follows:
Fig. 2. Inverted decoupling control system of a TITO process.       Fig. 3. Closed loop system with process input disturbance.
                                  E. Gagnon et al./ISA Transactions 37 (1998) 265±276                                269
would lead to the same conclusion. In all cases, to         The same diculty arises with inverted decoupling
obtain the same robustness, closed loop nominal             when the PID function bloc does not have feed-
performance must also be perfectly identical. For           forward input. Fig. 8 shows a decoupling control
processes with more complex dynamics (with dead             system (ideal or simpli®ed) where the antireset
times for instance), it can be very dicult, even           windup features of the PID blocks are used. This
impossible, to tune the controllers to obtain iden-         ®gure shows that it may be dicult to use the
tical nominal performance for the three decou-              antireset windup feature with ideal decoupling due
pling methods. For some processes, it may also              to the impossibility, in some cases, to invert the main
happen that the elements of the decouplers cannot           diagonal elements of the decoupling transfer matrix.
be perfectly realized and some dierences may
then appear in the robustness analysis.                     4.2. Manual mode
mode. With inverted decoupling, the system                   The resulting transfer matrix T s is therefore:
remains decoupled when the manual manipulated                        3            
                                                                     115s     0
variable is modi®ed, which is not the case for ideal         T s             3                              26
                                                                       0     115s
or simpli®ed decoupling.
                                                               To reach the nominal performance de®ned by a
4.3. Initialization                                          ®rst order dynamics with a time constant of ®ve
                                                             time units, the controller is:
   The decoupling control system must allow                          115s        
bumpless switches between manual and automatic                                 0
                                                             C s     15s
                                                                             115s                       27
modes. Therefore, before switching from the                             0     15s
manual to the automatic mode, the controller
outputs must be back calculated from the                     The next step in the design consists in verifying
manipulated variables in manual mode. Unfortu-               nominal stability. The process is obviously stable.
nately, since the decoupling elements are often not          The inverted decoupler, equivalent to D s de®ned
static, their outputs will not instantaneously take          by Eq. (4) with T11 s  P11 s and T22 s 
the right values, unless the lead-lag and delay              P22 s, is also stable. Fig. 9 shows the poles locus
blocks can be initialized to a speci®c value.                of the equivalent decoupling transfer matrix D s.
   The initialization problem can be avoided by              The nominal stability of the closed loop system is
waiting the decoupler to be in steady-state before           veri®ed, if the closed loop transfer matrix F s
switching to the automatic mode. This limitation             does not have any poles with a positive real part.
is not present with inverted decoupling because              Fig. 10 shows the nominal stability of the closed
the input of each decoupling element is a manipu-            loop system.
lated variable measurement.                                     Fig. 11 shows the nominal performance, robust
                                                             stability and robust performance conditions for an
4.4. Unwanted delay                                          uncertainty of 30% on each process input. The
                                                             nominal performance is respected. The system
   Because of the blocks scanning sequence, when             remains stable in spite of the uncertainty and the
implementing inverted decoupling for a TITO                  performance deterioration is more important at
process on a DCS using lead-lag and delay func-              low frequencies. However, the system becomes
tion blocks, an unwanted delay can be created in             unstable if the implementation of this control sys-
one of the decoupling elements. This delay of one            tem with function blocks introduces a delay of one
sampling period slightly decreases decoupling sys-           scan time (1 time unit in this case) in one of the
tem performance. With some processes, it can
even destabilize the control system if the calcu-
lated decoupler was close to instability, as illu-
strated by the following example.
4.5. Example
Fig. 10. Poles locus of the closed loop transfer matrix F s. Fig. 12. Poles locus of the closed loop transfer matrix F s.
Fig. 11. Robust stability, nominal performance and robust            Fig. 13. Poles locus of the equivalent transfer matrix D s.
performance conditions.
decoupler elements. Fig. 12 shows this instability                 can subtract a delay of one scan time in one cross-
by using a Pade approximation for the unwanted                     element of the inverted decoupling structure at the
delay added to the closed loop transfer matrix                     implementation time. However, the designer must
F s. Fig. 13, which shows the poles locus of the                  be careful to the order in which the chains of blocs
equivalent transfer matrix D s of the inverted                    are executed in the control system, to really com-
decoupler with the unwanted delay, indicates that                  pensate for the arti®cial delay and to avoid the
the instability comes from the decoupler.                          ampli®cation of the problem.
  It is therefore very important to take into
account a possible delay introduced by the blocks
scanning sequence. To avoid the introduction of                    5. Summary table
the delay, inverted decoupler could be imple-
mented using a unique multivariable block (possi-                     Table 1 summarizes the advantages and dis-
bly using a state-space representation). Also, if the              advantages of each decoupling method. The
inverted decoupling cross-elements require dead                    robustness is not discussed since it is identical for
times due to the delays of the process, the designer               all three decoupling techniques.
274                                    E. Gagnon et al./ISA Transactions 37 (1998) 265±276
Table 1
Advantages and disadvantages of each decoupling method
When one loop is in manual mode, dynamics of the remaining                 NO                  YES                  YES
  loop is unchanged
Decoupling elements do not contain a sum of transfer functions            YES                  NO                   YES
Transfer matrix of the decoupler in series with the process does          NO                   YES                  YES
  not contain sums of transfer functions
When loops are switched from manual to automatic mode,                     NO                   NO                  YES
  decoupling system initialization is simple
Saturation of the manipulated variables is easily taken into               NO                   NO                  YES
  account with a PID function block having an antireset
  feature and a feedforward input
Implementation with lead-lag and delay function blocks may                YES                  YES                   NO
  not decrease performance
A feedforward input to the PID function block facilitates the              NO                   NO                  YES
  decoupling system implementation
The antireset windup of the PID function block can be used                YES                   NO                  YES
  without inverting a transfer function
and                                                         Finally,
                                  
       P11 sP22 s ÿ P12 sP21 s
u2 s                                                                                P12 s
               P11 sP22 s                                 u1 s  c1 s ÿ u2 s              A:11
                                                                                      P11 s
                                    
          P11 sP22 s ÿ P12 sP21 s
  c2 s
                 P11 sP22 s                               and
                                             
            P21 s P11 sP22 s ÿ P12 sP21 s
   ÿ u1 s
            P22 s          P11 sP22 s                                              P21 s
                                                            u2 s  c2 s ÿ u1 s              A:12
                                               A:10                                  P22 s