Grey Qualitative Modeling and Control Method for Subjective Uncertain Systems

A new approach to model and control an unknown system using subjective uncertain rules is proposed. This method is established by combining the grey system theory and the qualitative simulation method. The proposed approach mainly contains three steps. In the first step, subjective uncertain rules are accumulated gradually during cognizing the system; the mapping relations between the system inputs and outputs are built and represented using the grey qualitative matrix in the second step; in the third step, the generalized whitening function is defined to realize the transformation between qualitative and quantitative information. Besides the theoretical results, two sets of simulations based on a water level control system are conducted comparatively to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The water level expectation is set to be constant in the first set, while it changes in the second set. The simulation results show that the proposed method tracks the water level expectation well. By combining the proposed method with proportional-integral-derivative (PID) or fuzzy logic controller (FLC), it can be concluded that the system can reach the stable state more quickly and the overshoot can also be reduced compared to using PID or FLC alone.