Controller and loop performance monitoring in a heating, ventilating, and air conditioning system

Abstract

A controller and loop performance monitoring system is coupled to a controller, detects loop performance degradation in time, and diagnoses a cause of the loop performance degradation. If the cause of loop performance degradation is poor controller tuning, a re-tuning mechanism is triggered. If the cause of loop performance degradation is external to the controller (a disturbance acting on the loop, hardware malfunction etc.), an action defined in control strategy is taken, or the user is informed via alarm, user interface, or upper layer software that collects the performance measures. The monitoring itself is designed to be recursive and with low memory demands, so it can be implemented directly in the controller, without need for data transfer and storage. The monitoring is modular, consisting of oscillation detection and diagnosis part, performance indices part, internal logic part, and triggering part, easily extensible by other performance indices or parts (e.g. for overshoot monitoring). The oscillation detection and diagnosis part includes controller output oscillation monitoring, the performance indices part includes predictability index and offset index. The outputs of the controller and loop performance monitoring are overall loop performance together with loop diagnosis information, and overall controller performance together with controller diagnosis. The outputs of the controller and loop performance monitoring are used as parts of controller and loop performance monitoring user interface.