Artificial intelligence in boiler control

Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques are becoming useful as alternate approaches to conventional techniques. They have been used to solve complicated practical problems and now a day is very popular. They can learn from examples, fault tolerant in the sense they are able to handle noisy and incomplete data and once trained can perform faster prediction and generalization. AI based systems are used mainly because of their symbolic reasoning, flexibility and explanation capabilities. This paper briefly presents the main AI techniques and outlines an application in boiler control. Master controller is required for a steam generating system having multiple boilers operating in parallel. AI technique of Fuzzy logic controller is proposed as master controller. The optimum performance of individual boilers is achieved by the master controller meeting the varying load demands of the steam system.