Experiences with rule-based control algorithms in a teaching laboratory and a diesel engine test cell

The authors believe that there is considerable scope for the exploitation of rule-based control methods in industry and the paper describes their initial attempts at getting to grips with the ideas. The implementation of rule-based control algorithms is considered for two very different types of process. The first involves the use of the `ball and beam´ apparatus which has been studied previously by a number of authors (Wellstead et al. (1978), Rees and White (1984)). The second project deals with the digital control of a marine diesel engine speed. In both cases, the control performance of a linguistic algorithm is compared to more traditional controller designs based on PID, modified deadbeat and state feedback methods