Spatially Constrained Fuzzy-Clustering-Based Sensor Placement for Spatiotemporal Fuzzy-Control System

Many industrial processes are spatiotemporal dynamic systems. A three-dimensional fuzzy-logic controller (3-D FLC) has been recently developed to process the inherent capability of spatiotemporal dynamic systems. Sensor placement, which is always crucial to the control of spatiotemporal dynamic systems, is also critical to the design of the 3-D FLC. In this paper, a new sensor-placement strategy is developed. Its main feature is to position the sensor by utilizing the main characteristics of spatial distribution. The key technique is to use a spatial-constrained fuzzy c-means algorithm to extract the characteristics of spatial distribution. For an easy implementation, a systematic sensor-placement design scheme in four steps (i.e., data collection, dimension reduction, data clustering, and sensor locating) is developed. Finally, control of a catalytic packed-bed reactor is taken as an application to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed sensor-placement scheme.