Intelligent distributed control of power plants

An Intelligent Distributed Controls Research Laboratory (IDCRL) was developed for the NSF Combined Research and Curriculum Development project, power plant intelligent distributed control. New graduate courses on: (1) power plant dynamics and control; and (2) power plant intelligent distributed control were developed. The capstone power plant intelligent distributed control course covered advanced subjects and laboratory experiments developed in the research portion of the project including: (1) extensions to achieve real-time performance of large scale power plant simulations using Unix network programming; (2) distributed implementation of advanced controller programming in an architecture of workstations and microprocessor-based controllers; and (3) intelligent controls using fuzzy logic, neural networks and genetic algorithms. Along with the curriculum development update, a summary of significant research activities is presented in order to provide a complete overview of the results of the projects.