Use of the benchmark for PID control in engineering studies at the University of Almería ⁎ ⁎This work has been partially funded by the following projects: DPI2014-55932-C2-1-R, DPI2014-56364-C2-1-R and DPI2017-84259-C2-1-R (financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy Industry and Competitiveness and EU-ERDF funds).

Abstract This paper presents the methodology followed to evaluate students ability to face the challenge of controlling a refrigeration system based on vapour compression proposed as a benchmark for PID control design in the PID18 Conference. This benchmark has been also proposed as test-bed plant for the design of controllers in the subject Industrial Control Techniques at the University of Almeria, Spain. The solutions proposed by the students range from simple SISO PID control loops (including anti-windup effect) to MIMO ones, including decoupling, filters and feedforward action to reject disturbances. All these solutions rely on models obtained from the reaction curve method. The selection of adequate specifications is encouraged, although students creativity has led them to exploit very aggressive specifications taking into account the different system restrictions, and obtaining very good values of the proposed evaluation indexes. © Copyright IFAC 2018.