On the individualized PIDA tuning for the automatic control of neuromuscular blockade

Abstract: In this work we investigate a patient-individualized tuning methodology for Proportional-Integral-Derivative Acceleration (PIDA) controllers employed for the automatic administration of atracurium to regulate the neuromuscular blockade level during surgery. The rationale consists in exploiting the administration of an atracurium bolus, given during anesthesia induction, to identify for each patient the parameters of a third-order minimally parametrized parsimonious model. This latter is then exploited to tune a PIDA controller with a Generalized Haalman tuning methodology. The performance is then compared with that of a PIDA controller tuned with a fixed set of parameters.