A Hybrid Approach for Design of Stable Adaptive Fuzzy Controllers Employing Lyapunov Theory and Particle Swarm Optimization

This paper proposes a new approach for designing stable adaptive fuzzy controllers, which employs a hybridization of a conventional Lyapunov-theory-based approach and a particle swarm optimization (PSO) based stochastic optimization approach. The objective is to design a self-adaptive fuzzy controller, optimizing both its structures and free parameters, such that the designed controller can guarantee desired stability and can simultaneously provide satisfactory performance. The design methodology for the controller simultaneously utilizes the good features of PSO (capable of providing good global search capability, required to provide a high degree of automation) and Lyapunov-based tuning (providing fast adaptation utilizing a local search method). Three different variants of the hybrid controller are proposed in this paper. These variants are implemented for benchmark simulation case studies and real-life experimentation, and their results demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed approach.