Adaptive Learning Control for DPS With Continually Emerging Operational Conditions

During the operation of a distributed parameter system (DPS), its working conditions typically undergo dynamic changes. Although online learning methods can enable models to adapt to new working conditions to some extent, they often confront the “catastrophic forgetting” problem, where the updated model forgets historical working conditions. On the other hand, only a few new samples can be collected during online operation, and the sparse samples make it difficult to establish accurate models for new working conditions. Therefore, achieving precise control under full working conditions remains a challenging problem. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an adaptive predictive control method based on continuous learning that achieves stable control under full working conditions by continuously identifying working conditions and triggering adaptive model updates in real time. Specifically, a spatial-temporal feature-based working condition identification method is first proposed to identify changes in working conditions automatically. Then, to address the challenge of limited data for model updating, a parameter transfer method is proposed. Simultaneously, to ensure that the updated model retains the ability to characterize historical working conditions, an Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC) constraint is incorporated into the loss function, thus overcoming the catastrophic forgetting problem, and ensuring the updated model can represent both the historical and new working conditions. Finally, by incorporating this condition identification mechanism and adaptive predictive model into the model predictive control framework, continuous precise control of DPS can be achieved. To demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method, extensive experiments are designed. Experimental results show that the proposed method can accurately identify new working conditions and learn new condition models with only a few online samples while overcoming model mismatch of historical conditions, ultimately achieving high-precision control under full working conditions.
Note to Practitioners
—Motivated by the fact that DPS often operates in different conditions and online learning methods confront “catastrophic forgetting” and “sparse sample training” problems, this paper proposes an adaptive learning control method. The proposed method can learn new working condition features with small online samples while retaining the ability to represent historical working conditions, and thus achieves accurate control under full working conditions.