Fuzzy supervisory control for fossil electric power plant start-up

This paper presents a fuzzy supervisory control system for a fossil electric power plant. This system does not operate in a closed loop, but provides control variable values to the human operator. The system structure is composed of three parts. The first one provides the values for the transient stage, the second one helps to stabilize the boiler operation, and the last one provides a set-point tuning. This fuzzy supervisory system was successfully tested in a full scale simulator. The start-up time was substantially reduced and a 15% cost reduction was obtained.