he demands of the modern economic climate have led to a dramatic increase in the industrial application of model-based predictive control techniques. In fact, apart from PID, predictive control is probably the most popular control approach in use today.

The predictive functional control (PFC) technique was first used to develop a model-based predictive controller that was easy to understand, implement and tune from an instrumentation engineer’s perspective. In the forty years since, there have been thousands of successful applications of PFC controllers in a large and diverse group of industries.