A control system as a system is used to control the behavior of a process or a device. Made up of three main components, namely a sensor, a controller and an actuator, control systems’ mechanical or electronic devices regulate other systems or devices by means of control loops. The control system on the other hand contains three units, which are the machine controller, the master and slave units. Control systems are typically computerized, and they happen to be a central part of production and distribution in many industries, with automation technologies being at the forefront for stechnologies being at the forefront for such systems. A control system is defined as any device able to maintain some measurable property of its environment the some set value or close to the set value without paying heed to other influences on that variable that would otherwise tend to change its valued [Kennaway, R. (2020)].
The types of control loops regulating the relevant processes include industrial control systems like supervisory control and data acquisition, systems and distributed control systems. Regarding the types, open-loop control systems do not use feedback. This situation means that the output is not impacted by the actual performance of the system. In fact, the input to the system is predetermined based on a set of predetermined rules or instructions. Closed-loop control systems make use of feedback in order to compare the desired output of the system to the actual output and adjust the input to the system depending on the difference between these two signals, called the error. The aim of a closed-loop control system is to eliminate or lessen the error by adjusting the input to the system in a way that drives the output towards the desired value. Continuous control systems are another type of systems which operate over a continuous range of time and/or output values. Using analogue or digital signals, they represent the input and output of the system. Discrete control systems operate at discrete points in time, and digital signals represent the input and output. Linear control systems can be represented by linear differential equations. In such systems, the system dynamics are proportional to the input, and they are described by means of linear mathematical operations. Nonlinear control systems: These cannot be represented by linear differential equations, and they manifest complex behaviors like bifurcation and chaos. While time-invariant control systems have the same input-output relationship at all times, time-varying control systems have a time-varying input-output relationship, and these are the results of changes in the external factors or system dynamics.
As for the control systems’ advantages and disadvantages, open loop control systems have control action independent of the desired output unlike closed loop control systems. Open loop control systems may be easy to design, while closed loop ones may have difficulty in terms of designing, so they may prove to be costlier. Close loop systems can also be actively set so that they can be operated autonomously, and the sensors and a feedback loop in those systems ensure that the system can function both with human intervention and also without human intervention. Some components in control loop modules are programmable logic controllers, programmable automation controllers, intelligent electronic devices, remote terminal units as well as control servers. To summarize, control systems are employed so that production, efficiency and safety can be improved in many industries.
Learning control suggests that the control system encompasses sufficient computational ability in order that it can develop a mathematical model of the system’s representation being controlled, which can modify its own operation to make use of such knowledge. In other words, the learning control system is a further development of the adaptive controller. Dynamic-optimizing control necessitates the control system to operate in a way that a specific performance criterion is to be fulfilled, and such a criterion is generally formulated in terms that the controlled system must shift from the original to a new position at a possibly minimum total cost within minimum possible time.
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