Adaptive Differential Evolution Supports Automatic Model Calibration in Furnace Optimized Control System

Model calibration represents the task of estimating the parameters of a process model to obtain a good match between observed and simulated behaviours. This can be considered as an optimization problem to search for model parameters that minimize the discrepancy between the model outputs and the corresponding features from the historical empirical data. This chapter investigates the use of Differential Evolution (DE), a competitive class of evolutionary algorithms, to solve calibration problems for nonlinear process models. The merits of DE include simple and compact structure, easy implementation, as well as high convergence speed. However, the good performance of DE relies on proper setting of its running parameters such as scaling factor and crossover probability, which are problem dependent and which can even vary in the different stages of the search. To mitigate this issue, we propose a new adaptive DE algorithm that dynamically adjusts its running parameters during its execution. The core of this new algorithm is the incorporated greedy local search, which is conducted in successive learning periods to continuously locate better parameter assignments in the optimization process. In case studies, we have applied our proposed adaptive DE algorithm for model calibration in a Furnace Optimized Control System. The statistical analysis of experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DE algorithm can support the creation of process models that are more accurate than those produced by standard DE.