Intelligent Fuzzy Controllers Laboratory

The Intelligent Fuzzy Controllers Laboratory has been developed in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Western Michigan University with the help of a DURIP grant by the Department of Defense [6] and generous donations by ABB Automation Technology Products. This new lab is to support research, the development of advanced courses, and graduate projects in the area of intelligent controls for large, complex hybrid systems. One of the targeted applications is the supervisory level of flatness control for cold rolling mills. Contemporary industrial control systems are designed using Object Oriented methods and software agents. It is required that the system should reach its goals even when unexpected events occur in an uncertain environment. The current research focus is on fault detection and automated recovery from faults. A fuzzy automaton has been proposed to model the system at critical junctions of the control algorithm. A research project is currently underway to develop a Generic Encapsulated Fuzzy Automaton Software Agent for Object Oriented Control Systems. The aim of the project is twofold: 1) to develop and evaluate the performance of new methods and architectures for this area of research, and 2) to create a laboratory environment in which masters and doctoral students can work on independent projects as well as course assignments. In the first part of the paper, we will summarize the key research ideas behind the lab. The second part of the paper will focus on creating a software environment for conducting research and supporting graduate courses in the intelligent supervisory controls area. Students will be developing solutions for plant control problems using skeleton codes provided and will be verifying the performance of their solutions with the help of the Fuzzy Automaton Software Agent and a plant simulator program. Both the Fuzzy Automaton Software Agent and the plant simulator are written in Java. These two programs are added to ABB's industrial software control system. The overall system will