On the use of the Eleveld PK/PD model for the design of PID control of anesthesia

This paper investigates the use of different pharmacokinetic/parmacodynamic models for the design of a PID-based control structure for total intravenous anesthesia. In particular, a PID controller tuned by exploiting the Schnider model for propofol administration (which has been developed for adults) in order to ensure the required robustness and performance is evaluated by considering patients modelled by using the recently developed Eleveld model. The latter is more general and, in principle, takes into account children, adults and elderly people. Simulation results show that clinically acceptable performance are obtained, disregarding the adopted model, for children and adults. On the contrary, the use of the Eleveld model to tune the controller for elderly people, for which a significant delay emerges, requires further investigation.