Preference driven multi-objective optimization design procedure for industrial controller tuning

Abstract

Multi-objective optimization design procedures have shown to be a valuable tool for con- trol engineers. These procedures could be used by designers when (1) it is difficult to find a reasonable trade-off for a controller tuning fulfilling several requirements; and (2) if it is worthwhile to analyze design objectives exchange among design alternatives. Despite the usefulness of such methods for describing trade-offs among design alterna- tives (tuning proposals) with the so called Pareto front, for some control problems finding a pertinent set of solutions could be a challenge. That is, some control problems are com- plex in the sense of finding the required trade-off among design objectives. In order to improve the performance of MOOD procedures for such situations, preference handling mechanisms could be used to improve pertinency of solutions in the approximated Pareto front. In this paper an overall MOOD procedure focusing in controller tuning applications using designer s preferences is proposed. In order to validate such procedure, a bench- mark control problem is used and reformulated into a multi-objective problem statement, where different preference handling mechanisms in the optimization process are evalu- ated and compared. The obtained results validate the overall proposal as a potential tool for industrial controller tuning.