Application of a New Scheme for Adaptive Unfalsified Control to a CSTR

In this paper, a new scheme for adaptive unfalsified control is demonstrated for a well-known example of a nonlinear plant, a continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR) with the van-der-Vusse reaction scheme. There are two new elements in our scheme: 1. Instead of switching between a finite number of controllers from a given, fixed set, an adaptation of the controller parameters is performed. For this purpose, a population-based evolutionary algorithm is used. 2. As the cost function that was originally proposed by Safonov is unable to correctly assess the potential performance of a controller that has not been in the loop, we propose a new cost function that employs the fictitious error for the actual reference signal. This error signal is determined by estimating the impulse response of the sensitivity function from the observed data.