Model-free control and fault accommodation for an experimental greenhouse

Frédéric Lafont (1) , Jean-François Balmat (1) , Nathalie Pessel (1) , Michel Fliess (2, 3)

1 LSIS - Laboratoire des Sciences de l'Information et des Systèmes
2 LIX - Laboratoire d'informatique de l'École polytechnique [Palaiseau]
3 AL.I.E.N. - ALgèbre pour Identification & Estimation Numériques

The greenhouse climate control is important in modern agriculture. It is also rather difficult to design: as a matter of fact writing down a "good" mathematical model, which takes into account strong meteorological disturbances, might be an impossible task. The control is here synthesized via a new "model-free" setting, which yields an "intelligent" proportional feedback controller, the tuning of which is straightforward, and even simpler than the intelligent proportional-integral controller, which was already utilized in a previous publication. Our control strategy is successfully tested via an experimental greenhouse. The comparison with the classic Boolean approach, which is popular among manufacturers, demonstrates the superiority of our viewpoint, which permits moreover an efficient actuator fault accommodation. It might be the first model-free fault-tolerant control, which works satisfactorily in practice.

Keywords: model-free fault-tolerant control; Agriculture; greenhouse control; model-free control; intelligent PID controllers; model-free fault-tolerant control.

Domains: Agricultural sciences; Automatic Control Engineering; Systems and Control [cs.SY]; Automatic; Optimization and Control [math.OC]

Frédéric Lafont, Jean-François Balmat, Nathalie Pessel, Michel Fliess. Model-free control and fault accommodation for an experimental greenhouse. International Conference on Green Energy and Environmental Engineering (GEEE-2014), May 2014, Sousse, Tunisia. 7 p. ⟨hal-00978226v2⟩