In the present paper, we discuss a new design method for a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control system using a model predictive approach. The PID compensator is designed based on generalized predictive control (GPC). The PID parameters are adaptively updated such that the control performance is improved because the design parameters of GPC are selected automatically in order to attain a user-specified control performance. In the proposed scheme, the estimated plant parameters are updated only when the prediction error increases. Therefore, the control system is not updated frequently. The control system is updated only when the control performance is sufficiently improved. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated numerically. Finally, the proposed method is applied to a weigh feeder, and experimental results are presented. © 2014 by ASME.