Expert supervision of conventional control systems

The objective of this paper is to outline a general concept for the design of supervising fuzzy controllers to back up or monitor a conventional control system. The use of fuzzy logic in an external, hierarchical control structure provides a systematic approach to integrate heuristics in a conventional control loop. Supervising techniques become especially interesting, when the system to be controlled is highly non-linear (parameter variation, saturation of the control surfaces, etc.). By the means of two application examples it is shown, how this method can effectively be used to improve the performance of a conventional control system. Both examples are part of an extended research project that is being carried out at Aerospatiale and ENSICA, in France to study the role of fuzzy control for potential applications in aircraft control systems