Process Control: Modeling, Design, and Simulation

M14.6. Drug Infusion System

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 maintain certain patient outputs within an acceptable operating range. Two important outputs to be maintained are mean arterial pressure (MAP) and cardiac output (CO). Often 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 M14-6.

Figure M14-6. Drug infusion control.

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