Digital Control Design and simulation in hydraulics. An integrated approach

The traditional approach to control systems design with assistance of numerical simulation is usually oriented towards the definition of an optimal control strategy in an idealized mathematical environment, amended with a few real system elements such as input/output quantization, input sampling and time delays. On the contrary, some characteristic elements of the final implementation on a target industrial application, specially in the range of low-cost microcontroller-based control systems, are neglected in simulation, leading to a separated re-coding of the control strategy for the target application before the beginning of the testing phase and therefore creating a gap between the concept and implementation sides of the problem. The proposed approach implies a more comprehensive evaluation of the real system in the simulation environment, by means of a direct usage of the final microcontroller ANSI-C code in the simulated model; it has been successfully applied to the EASY5 simulation environment to develop and verify an automotive electronic control unit, based on an 8-bit RISC microcontroller, for a hydrostatic transmission.