Comparative study of fuzzy control, PID control, and advanced fuzzy control for simulating a nuclear reactor operation

Based on the background of fuzzy control applications to the first nuclear reactor in Belgium (BR1) at the Belgian Nuclear Research Centre (SCK·CEN), we have made a real fuzzy logic control demo model. The demo model is suitable for us to test and compare some new algorithms of fuzzy control and intelligent systems, which is advantageous because it is always difficult and time-consuming, due to safety aspects, to do all experiments in a real nuclear environment. In this paper, we first report briefly on the construction of the demo model, and then introduce the results of a fuzzy control, a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control and an advanced fuzzy control, in which the advanced fuzzy control is a fuzzy control with an adaptive function that can self-regulate the fuzzy control rules. Afterwards, we present a comparative study of those three methods. The results have shown that fuzzy control has more advantages in terms of flexibility, robustness, and easily updated facilities with respect to the PID control of the demo model, but that PID control has much higher regulation resolution due to its integration term. The adaptive fuzzy control can dynamically adjust the rule base, therefore it is more robust and suitable to those very uncertain occasions.