A Practical Approach to the Design of Fuzzy Controllers with Application to Dynamic Ship Positioning

Abstract This paper compares the performance of a non-linear fuzzy logic based controller with that of a standard linear three term PID controller and a control strategy based on a Kalman filter approach, when applied to one axis of motion within the ship dynamic positioning (DP) problem. By taking a pragmatic view of the design methodologies for the specific application, a practical approach to the design of a fuzzy controller is presented and some of the dangers arising from uninformed use of fuzzy logic highlighted.