The paper describes the design and implementation of a self-tuning automatic voltage regulator (STAVR) based on the generalised predictive controller (GPC), When implementing self-tuning controllers on industrial systems such as turbogenerators it is pertinent to consider several potential problems before a reasonable design can evolve. For example, in actual industrial plants, the quality of the plant signals used for feedback purposes is far from perfect, which may be attributed to sensor noise, sensor lag, aliasing, quantisation error, etc. These issues, along with the robustness, unmodelled dynamics, disturbances, steady-state offsets and nonlinearities, are considered.