Adaptive neural network control of the temperature in an oven

Many authors have shown by simulated studies, that a great number of non-linear dynamical systems could be identified and controlled by using neural network models. The authors applied these results to a real process : an oven with two inputs, one for heating and one for cooling. The output to be controlled is the temperature inside the oven. The choice of the control strategy on the one hand and the choice of the neural network architecture for the oven identification on the other hand had to satisfy two main objectives. First, the control strategy should be quite insensible to random disturbances (air leaks, door openings, ...) and the neural model should be able to fit any modification of the plant dynamics during its lifetime (modification of the internal load alteration of the heating system ...). The authors chose to use the internal model control as their control strategy. They also used a radial basis function network to identify the plant. The process identification is composed of two phases, an off-line one and an online one. The off-line part consists first in training the network while determining its internal structure using an initial training set. The on-line phase is the adaptive part of the control scheme