Choose a Control Design Approach

Simulink^® Control Design™ lets you design and tune many types of control systems in Simulink. There are also deployable PID autotuning tools that let you tune your controller in real time against a physical plant.

Design in Simulink

Simulink Control Design provides several approaches to tuning Simulink blocks, such as Transfer Fcn and PID Controller blocks. Use the following table to determine which approach best supports what you want to do.

	Model-Based PID Tuning	Classical Control Design	Multiloop, Multiobjective Tuning
Supported Blocks	PID Controller Discrete PID Controller PID Controller (2DOF) Discrete PID Controller (2DOF)	Linear Blocks (see What Blocks Are Tunable?)	Any blocks; only some blocks are automatically parameterized (See How Tuned Simulink Blocks Are Parameterized)
Architecture	1-DOF and 2-DOF PID loops	Control systems that contain one or more SISO compensators	Any structure, including any number of SISO or MIMO feedback loops
Control Design Approach	Automatically tune PID gains to balance performance and robustness	Graphically tune poles and zeros on design plots, such as Bode, root locus, and Nichols Automatically tune compensators using response optimization (Simulink Design Optimization™), LQG synthesis, or IMC tuning	Automatically tune controller parameters to meet design requirements you specify, such as setpoint tracking, stability margins, disturbance rejection, and loop shaping (see Tuning Goals)
Analysis of Control System Performance	Time and frequency responses for reference tracking and disturbance rejection	Any combination of system responses	Any combination of system responses
Interface	Graphical tuning using PID Tuner (see Introduction to Model-Based PID Tuning in Simulink) Tuning of plants that do not linearize (see Frequency-Response Based Tuning) Programmatic tuning using `pidtune` (see PID Controller Design at the Command Line)	Graphical tuning using Control System Designer	Graphical tuning using Control System Tuner Programmatic tuning using `slTuner` (see Programmatic Tuning)

Real-Time PID Autotuning

The real-time PID autotuning tools in Simulink Control Design let you deploy an automatic tuning algorithm as a stand-alone application for PID tuning against a physical plant. Real-time PID autotuning lets you tune a PID controller to achieve a specified bandwidth and phase margin without a parametric plant model or an initial controller design.

The real-time PID autotuning algorithm can tune PID gains in Simulink PID Controller blocks or in your own custom PID blocks. You can tune against your physical plant with or without Simulink in the loop. Deploying the real-time PID autotuning algorithm requires a code-generation product such as Simulink Coder™.

For more information, see When to Use PID Autotuning.