Design of a multilevel fuzzy controller for nonlinear systems and stability analysis

In this paper, a multilevel fuzzy control (MLFC) system is developed and implemented to deal with the real-world nonlinear plants with intrinsic uncertainties and time-varying parameters. The proposed fuzzy control strategy has a hierarchical structure with an adaptation mechanism embedded in the lower level to tune the output membership functions (MFs) of the first layer fuzzy controller and can be used to control a system with an input-output monotonic relationship or a piecewise monotonic relationship. The stability of the closed-loop system under the proposed MLFC is theoretically proven. Simulations are carried out by applying the proposed multilevel fuzzy control (MLFC) to a uncertain nonlinear plants, and it is shown that much better system performances are achieved compared with conventional fuzzy logic controllers (FLC), even in presence of disturbance and noise.