Teaching PID control to computer engineers: a step to fill a cultural gap

Many computer engineers either do not receive any control education, or are led to think that studying control is necessary only for those who want to specialise in embedded systems, real-time, and so forth. This causes a cultural gap that can have highly undesired consequences, since control-based techniques are gaining importance as a means to manage and optimise computing systems. Given the conflicts for time and space that are typical of articulated curricula like computer engineering, however, a full course on the principles of systems and control, tailored to computer engineering, is quite often an infeasible solution. This paper presents an alternative – or maybe better, a workaround – based on a suitably tailored PID-centred activity, where the occasion is taken to introduce and stress selected general ideas.