Adaptive sliding mode control based on fuzzy logic for variable dead time processes

This paper aims to show an adaptive control scheme of Sliding Mode Control and Fuzzy Logic to adjust the tuning parameters of a Sliding Mode Controller (SMC) when it is used for variable dead time systems. The idea behind this work is to take advantage of the fuzzy adapting part to improve the performance of the Sliding Mode Control approach. The original Sliding Mode Control yields a limited performance when applied to variable dead time processes. A simple identification procedure is used to obtain the characteristic parameters of the process. Later they are used to calculate the original tuning parameters of the Sliding Mode control, that represent the initial tuning values for the controller, then the fuzzy adaptive scheme part acts to adjust these tuning parameters in order to get a better performance.