Variable Structure Controller for Plastic Injection Moulding System

This paper discusses the approach to design of combined ANN and PID temperature controller for a plastic injection moulding system. The proposed method is based on integration of a conventional PID (PI) controller and a multilayer ANN. At the initial stage of operation, the ANN is trained in offline mode to approximately identify the dynamic parameters of the regulator optimised in terms of speed of response and overshoot. Under routine operation mode the ANN control structure is responsible for the fast transients whereas PID (PI) controller provides the high accuracy at the steady state condition. The paper focuses on the structure switching mechanism and the influence on the transient accuracy. In order to verify the proposed approach, the control system having various types of heaters has been modelled and simulated in Matlab/Simulink. The data obtained from the experiment verified the developed model and confirmed the results of simulations.