Teaching PID to Future Professionals as a Contribution to Fill a Historical Gap

Several authoritative literature sources evidence a gap between how control is taught in the academia and how it is applied in the engineering practice. This paper argues that an important obstacle toward filling the said gap resides in the way basic control blocks like PIDs are treated in most control curricula, especially at the fundamental (typically, BSc) level. More specifically, the problem is that too little focus is set on some functionalities that not only are necessary for the correct operation of those blocks, but are also required to reach a firm grasp on how a control scheme of professionally realistic complexity is structured. Based on the considerations just sketched, a didactic proposal to embrace such functionalities right from the basics of PID teaching is then formulated.