Bumpless transfer between advanced controllers with applications to power plant control

This paper deals with bumpless transfer between a number of advanced controllers, e.g. in a gain-scheduling architecture. Linear observer-based controllers are designed for a number of linear approximations of the system model in a set of operating points, and gain scheduling control can subsequently be achieved by interpolating between each controller. We use the Youla-Jabr-Bongiorno-Kucera parameterization to achieve a differentiable scheduling between the controllers. This approach produces a controller as a linear fractional transformation between a controller and a scheduling parameter. In this paper we propose a systematic approach to achieve bumpless transfer between different nominal controllers. The approach is tested on a simple, but highly nonlinear model of a coal-fired power plant.