Process Control: Modeling, Design, and Simulation

M12.6. Critical Care Patients

Critical care patients have often suffered a “disturbance” to the normal operation of their physiological system; this disturbance could have been generated by surgery or some sort of trauma (e.g., a heart attack). A responsibility of the critical care physician is to main tain certain patient outputs within an acceptable operating range. Two important outputs to be maintained are mean arterial pressure (MAP) and cardiac output (CO). During surgery the anesthesiologist will infuse several drugs into the patient in order to control these states close to the desired values. A conceptual diagram is shown in Figure M12-2.

Figure M12-2. Drug infusion control.

The goal of this control system design is to manipulate the ...