A Reconfigurable Hybrid System and Its Application to Power Plant Control

This paper presents a reconfigurable approach to implement decision and control systems for complex dynamic processes. The proposed supervisory control system is a reconfigurable hybrid architecture structured into three functional levels of hierarchy, namely, execution, supervision, and coordination. While the bottom execution level is constituted by either reconfigurable continuously varying or discrete-event systems, the top two levels are necessarily governed by reconfigurable sets of discrete-event decision and control systems. Based on the process status, the set of active control and supervisory algorithm is chosen. The underlying concept of the proposed reconfigurable hybrid decision and control is described along with its implementation on the feedwater system at the Experimental Breeder Reactor II of the Argonne National Laboratory. The performance of the hybrid system to accommodate component failures is then evaluated in an in-plant experiment.