Welcome computer scientists to the bleeding edge control scheme of the 1920’s.
Teasing apart, it always amazes me how slow the diffusion of innovation is across different fields.
Teasing apart, it always amazes me how slow the diffusion of innovation is across different fields.
I had been dabbling with electronics for a while, so I had heard of PID controllers (as black boxes). Never really thought of them outside of that.
The first time it clicked for me that this could have applications in other fields was when playing a game. Stationeers, to be precise. Sure, the PID controller that a user is created was controlling a device in the game, but the actual code was implemented in 'assembly' and very simple to understand. That led me to think that I could use that in place of our simpler autoscalers at work. I have not implemented a solution, but that's how the gears started to turn.
Reading this thread, apparently the field has advanced far past PID controllers. Now it's yet another rabbit hole to go through...
The main idea is that control problems can be posed as optimization problems where we try to achieve some goal (financial / stability etc) while satisfying some hard restrictions.
For example try to change lines gracefully and fast on the highway without crashing on another car.
For your particular case, if you want something dirt cheap (computationally) and reliable then the PID is a great first step.