Biosystems Control Design - Diabetes

Exercise 23.6
 

Consider the diabetic patient in Example 23.3. Your goal is to design an automated device to administer her insulin in response to meal disturbances

  1. Considering only the insulin-glucose dynamics (i.e., ignore the meal for the moment), calculate an approximate second-order patient model by fitting the responses obtained from simulations of the equations given in the example.
  2. Using the IMC tuning rules, design a PID controller for this process.
  3. Simulate the closed-loop system response to a step set point change in blood glucose of -20 mg/dl. Try to tune your controller to improve the transient.
  4. Simulate the closed-loop system response to the meal disturbance described in Example 23.4. Is your controller able to maintain the safety boundaries for blood glucose (54mg/dL < G < 144mg/dL)?
  5. In practice, the sensors available for measuring blood glucose sample from the subcutaneous tissue (the layer of fat under the skin, as opposed to directly from the blood stream). Assuming that such a procedure introduces a pure delay, repeat your simulation from part (d) with a 10 minute sensor delay. How has the performance changed? What is the maximum time delay that your closed-loop design will tolerate before it becomes unstable?