Evaporator unit as a benchmark for Plug and Play and fault tolerant control

Abstract

This paper presents a challenging industrial benchmark for implementation of control strategies under realistic working conditions. The developed control strategies should perform in a plug & play manner, i.e. adapt to varying working conditions, optimize their performance, and provide fault tolerance. A fault tolerant strategy is needed to deal with a faulty sensor measurement of the evaporation pressure. The design and algorithmic challenges in the control of an evaporator include: unknown model parameters, large parameter variations, varying loads, and external discrete phenomena such as compressor switch on/off or abrupt change in compressor speed.