(1) PID controller can be used to control most industrial processes. Always try PID controller first.
(2) It is traditionally believed that, when using PID controller to control processes with long dead-time, it is not easy to find a good set of values for the three PID constants (e.g. Kp, Ki, and Kd). This difficulty is history with the recently developed excellent PID tuning software BESTune. Visit BESTune's web site: