Fuzzy logic-based supervisory control of household appliances

There has been a significant change in appliance control technology in the direction of incorporating improved sensing and controls, brought about by a variety of regulatory and market forces. Cost constraints, however, continue to play a dominant role in limiting the sophistication of sensors that can be used in appliances. The challenge is to improve the control technology while adhering to the cost constraints. Techniques that extract the maximum possible information from the existing sensor suite, using a combination of conventional and heuristic methods, are required. This paper proposes a supervisory control architecture consisting of (i) rule-based parameter estimation algorithms, (ii) a method to sequentially improve parameter estimates during the course of the process via sensor integration, and (iii) a process optimization algorithm.