A hierarchical rule-based control of a diesel engine system

A two-layer hierarchical rule based controller is proposed for the control design of a diesel engine. Diesel engines are known for their high versatility making them useful in a wide range of applications such as in automotive, boat and ship industry, and in backup power generating systems. Despite their attractive features, diesel engines suffer from highly nonlinear and time varying dynamics making them hard to control by means of conventional model based control techniques. The design philosophy proposed in this paper is that a control supervisor, chosen here as a fuzzy tuner, which monitors the system behavior and its output response at a high layer of the control hierarchy, can be used effectively to complement the action of the hard controllers serving as actuators to the system in the lower layer of the hierarchy. Simulation runs on a numerical model of the system are carried out and the system performance outputs are recorded. Possible extension of the current work are outlined and concluding remarks are drawn