Advanced Fuzzy Neural Modelling And Control With Application

Project Title:

Advanced Fuzzy Neural Modelling and Control with Applications.

Project Description:

The advanced control systems in energy intensive industrial sectors are facing with great opportunities and challenges to cope with various requirements on environmental protection and energy conservation today. These considerations call for more effective process modelling techniques as it provides a way of formally developing and proving properties of the closed loop system. Unlike the black-modelling techniques, if the accuracy is not the only ultimate and rather an understanding of the functioning of the process is desired, then fuzzy model is an excellent choice due to its high transparency. As a combination of fuzzy systems and neural networks, the fuzzy neural networks (FNNs) are aiming to combine the learning capability of neural networks with the transparency and interpretability of the rule-based fuzzy systems.
To date, many researches are concentrated on learning a more accurate fuzzy model, but leaving the model complexity and model interpretability as the remaining challenges. It is quite important to address these problems since that act as some of basic motivations of using the fuzzy neural systems. The main objective is to develop some efficient and effective algorithms in coping with the complexity and interpretability issues. For that reason, a number of numerical nonlinear optimization techniques and linear estimation methods are carrying out to achieve an accurate and understandable fuzzy neural model.
As a part of the UK-China Science Bridge project, this research is jointly carried out with Tsinghua University on air-conditioning, and Shanghai University through the Shanghai Key Laboratory of Power Station Automation Technology and their industrial collaborators for improving thermal efficiency and reducing pollutant emissions on thermal power generation. Part of the techniques also can be extended in extrusion process which is a fundamental polymer process.