Active disturbance rejection-based industrial cascade control plant with cloud monitoring

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide benefits for companies or organizations, which deal with fewer input-outputs and wanted to control their industrial processes remotely with a robust control strategy. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, an active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) strategy is used for the two tank level process plant and it is remotely monitored with the industrial internet of things technology. The disturbances in a primary and secondary loop of the cascade process, which are affecting the overall settling time (ts) of the process, are eliminated by using the proposed, ADRC-ADRC structure in the cascade loop. The stability of the proposed controller is presented with Hurwitz’s stability criteria for selecting gains of observers. The results of the proposed controller are compared with the existing active disturbance rejection control-proportional (ADRC-P) and proportional-integral derivative-proportional (PID-P)-based controller by experimental validation. Findings It is observed that the settling time (ts) in the case of the proposed controller is improved by 60% and 55% in comparison to PID-P and ADRC-P, respectively. The level process is interfaced with an industrial controller and real-time data acquired in matrix laboratory (MATLAB), which acted as a remote monitoring platform for the cascade process. Originality/value The proposed controller is designed to provide robustness against disturbance and parameter uncertainty. This paper provides an alternate way for researchers who are using MATLAB and ThingSpeak cloud server as a tool for the implementation.