The methods proposed by Astrom and Hagglund (IFAC Adaptive Control of Chemi
cal Processes, Pergamon Press, New York, 1985, pp. 205-210), Mantz and Tacc
oni (Int. J. Control 49 (1989) 1465-1471; Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 20 (1990) 12
49-1253) for selection of set-point weighting parameters for stable systems
are extended to unstable first-order plus time-delay (FOPTD) systems. Sinc
e these methods require the real part of the dominant pole, an analytical s
olution is derived for calculation of dominant poles of the closed-loop sys
tem given the PID controllers settings. For PID controller settings given b
y DePaor and O'Malley (Int. J. Control 49 (1989) 1273-1284) and Clement and
Chidambaram (Chem. Eng. Commun. 62 (1997) 63-74), the set-point weighting
parameters are calculated and simple equations are given for the parameters
in terms of epsilon (ratio of time delay to dominant time constant). Simul
ation results on an unstable FOPTD transfer function model and higher-order
transfer function model show that the overshoot is significantly reduced b
y employing the set-point weighting parameters in the PID controller. The p
erformances of the closed-loop servo responses for all the extended methods
are compared. (C) 2000 The Franklin Institute. Published by Elsevier Scien
ce Ltd. All rights reserved.