An adaptive fuzzy controller based on harmony search and its application to power plant control

Considering the reliability and safety requirements of power stations, a novel adaptive fuzzy controller is presented to implement non-overshoot control in power plants in which the Lyapunov-based adaptive law is employed to guarantee the stability of the controller while a modified Adaptive Binary Harmony Search (ABHS) algorithm is utilized to search the optimal control parameters to improve the dynamic performance. Two strategies are analyzed and used with ABHS to guarantee the non-overshoot of control. Furthermore, a simple but efficient repair operation is developed to deal with the time-varying characteristic of the thermal process. Finally, the proposed ABHS-based Adaptive Fuzzy Control (ABHSAFC) method is applied to the bed temperature control of the Circulating Fluidized Bed Boiler (CFBB). The experimental results demonstrate that ABHSAFC can implement the expected non-overshoot control efficiently and outperforms the classical Lyapunov-based adaptive fuzzy control, ABHS-based fuzzy control and ABHS-based PID control. Considering the characteristics of the easy implementation, robustness and the guaranteed stability, ABHSAFC promises a favorable engineering application prospect.