Study of Intelligent Control Techniques Applied to a Stirring Tank with Heat Exchanger

This work presents a study and evaluation of intelligent control techniques applied to the problem of temperature control of a stirring tank with heat exchanger. This problem is represented by the example provided and documented by MathWorks in MATLAB/Simulink software, called Heatex. The intelligent techniques used are Fuzzy Logic Controller (FLC), Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCM), Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and the combination of these. The proportional-integral (PI) controller provided in the Heatex example is considered as a reference basis during the evaluation of the intelligent control techniques in different test scenarios. The metrics Integral of Absolute Error (IAE) and Integral Time-weighted Absolute Error (ITAE), as well as the parameters overshoot percentage and settling time are the criteria used to evaluate the control techniques performance.