Application of a Direct Model Reference Adaptive Controller (DMRAC) in a Nonlinear Cardiovascular Model

The objective of this study is to design a robust direct model reference adaptive controller (DMRAC) for a nonlinear cardiovascular model over a range of plant parameters representing a variety of physical conditions. The direct adaptive controllers used in thisd study require the plant to be almost strictly positive real (ASPR) that is, for a plant to be controlled there must exist a feedback gain such that the resulting closed loop system is strictly positive real. We designed a new compensator so that the system composed of the cardiovascular plant and the compensator satisfy the ASPR condition. Numerous studies in the past have considered a small range of gain variations of the cardiovascular system. In most cases, the controller was designed based on variations in either time delay or plant gains. Many of these workers treated the cardiovascular system as a single-input single output (SISo) plant in which the control output was Mean Arterial Pressure (MAO). We treated the cardiovascular system as a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) plant in which both the MAP and Cardiac Output (CO) are simultaneously controlled. In this study, a new linear model is presented that provides a better approximation thanthe one the original linear model does. By doing so and utilizing the DMRAC algorithm, we could satisfy the stability conditions for the nonlinear model while satisfactory responses obtained under every possible condition for the cardiovascular nonlinear model. Keywords: Adaptive control, Cardiovascular system, Blood pressure, Cardiac output