Vol 341 No 4 pp 585-588 1994

Copynght~ 1994ElsewerSc~.nceLtcl
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0005 1098/945600+000

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Pergamon

0005-10~(93)E0010--2

Application of Model Reference Adaptive

Control to a Benchmark Problem*
P A COOK?

A discrete-ttme model-reference adapttve control scheme, apphed to a

simulation of an unknown time-varymg plant, achieves good performance
when the parameters of the algorithm are appropriately selected
Key Words--Adapt,ve systems, &screte t~me systems, model reference adaptwe control, parameter
estimation, robustness

low-order models, while also keeping the

algorithm as simple as possible
The baste algorithm IS described m SecUon 2,
along weth various mo&ficatlons, of which some,
though not all, have been tried m the present
investigation In Section 3, the apphcatton to the
'benchmark problem' of the unknown plant is
reported, mainly by means of simulation results
On the basts of this study, some tentatwe
conclusions are drawn and presented in Section
4

Abs/rset--Several vers,ons of a d,screte-t,me modelreference adaptive control scheme are apphed to a

s,mulatmn model of an unknown plant, m order to
mvesttgate the effect of mod,ficattous intended to enhance
the robustness of the system It ts found that, m this
apphcateon, the s, mplest form of the algonthm appears to be
the most effectwe, provided that the samphng rate, reference
model and adaptatton gain are appropnately chosen
1 INTRODUCTION

NUMEROUS METHODS have been proposed to

improve the robustness of adapuve control
algorithms, including the use of known or
assumed parameter bounds, leakage and/or
dead zones in the estimator, filtenng and
normalization of data etc, apart from rehance
on persistent exotatton (Ioannou and Kokotowe, 1984; Krelsselmeler and Anderson, 1986,
Ortega et al 1985) This paper reports the
apphcatlon of a discrete-time model-reference
adaptwe control scheme, based on a proJection
algorithm (Goodwm et al, 1980) but capable of
incorporating modifications to enhance tts
robustness, to a simulation model of an
unknown plant (Graebe, 1994) The general
approach, as m Cook (1989, 1991, 1992), ts to
sample as slowly as is compatible with the
destred performance, so as to filter out
unmodelled dynamic effects and allow the use of

2 ADAPTIVE CONTROL SCHEME

At samphng mstant k, let the plant input be

denoted by u(k), the output by y(k), and the
reference signal by r(k) The adaptive control
scheme, as used in the present investigation, ~s
based on the approximate representation of the
mput-outpt~t relation in the form

y(k + 1) = ay(k) + bu(k),

where (a, b) are unknown parameters
defining a parameter vector

0 = [a, b/w],

Then,
(2)

where w is an adjustable weighting factor, and a

regressor v e c t o r

~b(k) : [y(k), wu(k)]T

(3)

the relation (1) can be written as

* Rece,ved m final form 28 September 1993 The original

vet's,on of this paper was presented at the 12th IFAC World
Congress wh,ch was held in Sydney, Austraha, Dunng 19-23
July 1993 The Pubhshed Proceedings of this IFAC Meeting
may be ordered from Elsevier Soence Lira,ted, The
Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kldhngton, Oxford OX5 1GB,
U K This paper was recommended for pubhcat,on m revised
form by Guest Ed,tor S Graebe under the direct,on of
E&tor H Kwakernaak Corresponding author P A Cook
Tel +44 61 236 3311, Fax +44 61 228 7040
t Control Systems Centre, Department of Electrical
Engmeenng and Electromcs, Umvers,ty of Manchester
Inst, tute of Sc,ence and Technology, Manchester M60 1QD,
UK

y(k + 1) : OTep(k)

(4)

Since 0 is unknown, It IS replaced by an estimate

O(k) m order to calculate a predicted output.
)3(k + 1) = OT(k)dp(k)

(5)

and a pre&ctlon error

e(k + 1) = y(k + 1) - ~(k + 1)

(6)

The control law is then chosen so that, ff the

585

AUTO30:4-C

(1)

586

P A Cook

parameter estimation were exact, the controlled

system would match a reference model with
z-transfer function ( 1 - p ) / ( z - p )
for some p
with - l < p < l ,
which can be achieved by
setting
)~(k + 1) = p y ( k ) + (1 - p ) r ( k )

(7)

and then computing u(k), given O(k), by using

(3) and (5)
Alternatively, defining Incremental variables
u'(k) = u(k) - u(k - 1),

(8)

y ' ( k ) = y ( k ) - y ( k - 1)

(9)

t~'(k) = [y'(k), wu'(k)] T

(10)

dead-zone functmn
e - 6 sgn (e),
O(e) = 0,

I~1 >
lel-----<6,

(14)

for some posmve 6, which may be either

constant or related to the input and output
magnitudes, as proposed by Krelsselmemer and
Anderson (1986)
Leakage This mechanism, also known as the
o-modification (loannou and Kokotovlc, 1984),
could be mtroduced by replacing O(k) in (12)
wah ( 1 - o ) O ( k ) + o O , where 0 is a prior
estimate of 0 and o is a small positive constant

and

the output prediction can be altered to

)~(k + 1) = y ( k ) + e r ( k ) ' ( k )

(11)

and the control law obtained by computing u(k)

from (7)-(11) This procedure has the potential
advantage that it incorporates integral action m
the controller, even if the parameter estimates
are frozen.
2.1. Parameter esumauon
The basic form of the parameter estimator is
O(k + 1) = O(k) + ge(k + 1)~p(k)/p(k),

(12)

where g is the adaptation gain, with 0 < g < 2,

p ( k ) = # p ( k - 1) + eT(k)(k) + ).

(13)

and # ms a constant factor, 0 - - - # < 1 , which

serves, when # > 0, to preserve some memory of
past data, while 3. is a small positive constant
introduced to avoid the possibility of &vision by
zero In the case that incremental variables are
used, (k) IS replaced in (12) and (13) by ~'(k)
The robustness properties of the estimation
algorithm, as it stands, arise either from
persistent excitation, due to disturbances and/or
changes in the reference signal, or from the
'memory factor' # in (13) which, according to
Ortega et al (1985), provides for a trade-off
between robustness and alertness Modifications
to the algorithm, which have been suggested in
order to make it more robust, include the
following
Parameter bounding The parameter estimates
can be forced to remain within given bounds by
taking the value calculated from (12) as a
preliminary update, to be replaced by the
nearest vector in the allowed set, so as to avoid
arbitrary dnftIng
Dead zones The factor e(k + 1) in (12) can be
replaced by D ( e ( k + l ) ) , where D ( ) is a

3 APPLICATION

The benchmark simulation model (Graebe,

1994) represents a system with time-varying
parameters and noisy output measurements, but
preliminary open-loop studies indicate that it can
be reasonably well approximated by the basic
form (1), with (a, b) subject to change and some
noise disturbance added A set-point reference
r(k) IS specafied In the form of a square-wave
signal with unit amplitude and penod 20 s The
output is sampled at intervals of 50 ms, but the
sampling rate can be reduced by an arbitrary
integer factor N, and the Input held fixed over N
successive sampling Instants In the present
context, the possibihty of altering N appears
worth investigating, since a lower sampling rate
tends to eliminate the effect of paraslttC
dynamics, even though it may also h i l t the
attainable performance of the controlled system
This consequently provides a further means of
making the control scheme more robust, at least
as regards undermodelhng, albeit at the place of
decreased alertness to parameter change
3 1 Stmulat~on results
The specified requirements for performance of
the controlled system were that the output
should always remam between +1.5 (preferably
+1 2), with rise time of a few seconds and fast
settling to zero steady state error (wlthm the
noise amplitude) Moreover, this should be
achieved for each of three 'stress levels', where
higher levels involve more severe time-variation
In the present study, two versions of the
adaptive control scheme described above were
used, based on the regressor vectors (3), (10)
respectively, with a variety of values for the
sampling rate (20/N Hz), reference model pole
(p), adaptation gain (g), relative parameter
weighting (w), memory factor (#) and dead zone
width (6) The constant A In (13) was set at 0 01
throughout, and the only parameter bound used
was a lower hmlt of 0 01 on the estimate of b, in

Apphcatlon of model reference adaptwe control

order to avoid dlwslon by zero when calculating
u(k) Otherwise, a prtort assumptmns about true
parameter values were avoided and, for this
reason, leakage was not employed
The simulation results indicated that the
second scheme, based on incremental vanables,
was unsuccessful in th~s apphcatlon, and so
attention was concentrated on the first one It
was found that neither the memory factor nor
the dead zone appeared to give any advantage,
and that changes in the relative weighting of
parameters d~d not have much effect, but that
the results were strongly dependent on the
reference model and adaptation gem, and to
some extent on samphng rate The results here
presented were obtained with a samphng time of
0 5 s (rate 2 Hz), 1 e N = 10, and the model pole
p = 0 8, corresponding to a time constant ~2 3 s,
while w = l , # = 0 and di=0 In choosmg the
adaptation gem, tt appeared necessary to
compromise between speed of response and
keeping the output within the prescribed
bounds, with the result that slightly different
values were found statable for the different stress
levels The values actually used were stress level
1, g = 0 2 (Fig 1), stress level 2, g = 0 15 (Fig
2), stress level 3, g = 0 12 (Fig 3) Each figure
shows the output from three simulation runs,
each of 100s duration, spilt into five 20s
segments and superimposed As might be
expected, the results indicate that the achievement of adequate control was more difficult for
the higher stress levels, which was the reason for
reducing the adaptation gem in these cases For
level 3, it was indeed found in more extensive
simulation runs that the output bounds were
occasionally violated, which suggests that g
should be further reduced, even though this
would tend to slow down the response and
decrease the alertness of the system In the cases

15

05

-05

587

15

i
-i
0

10

15

20

FIG 2 SImulatmn results for stress level 2

15

-0

-I

10

20

FIG 3 Simulation results for stress level 3

of levels 1 and 2, all simulations with the values

of g given above showed the output remaining
within the required bounds, and reasonable rise
and setthng times For all stress levels, the
transient behavlour appeared acceptable, although there were some signs of non-minimumphase behavlour (lnmal movement in the wrong
direction) In each simulation run, the parameter
estimates were gwen the initial values 0T(0)=
[0 9, 0 1], a somewhat arbRrary but not crucially
important choice, based on open-loop experiments The results did not appear very sensltwe
to the preose values chosen and, in the
simulations reported here, the precautionary
lower bound on the estimate of b was never
reached
4 CONCLUSIONS

-11

5'

1b

15
'

FIG 1 Szmulatlon results for stress level 1

ZO

The alms of this study were to investigate the

apphcabdlty of model-reference adaptive control
and the effect of venous modifications to the
adaptation algorithm From the simulation

588

P A

results, it appears that adequate p e r f o r m a n c e

could be obtained by usmg the basic algorithm
with suttable samphng rate, reference model
dynamics and adaptation gains, and that
robustness-enhancmg modifications were not
helpful Further simulations, starting wtth wildly
inappropriate p a r a m e t e r estimates, showed eventual convergence into a region of much m o r e
reasonable values and correspondmgly good
control, indicating that the reference signal and
disturbances provided sufficient excitation to
m a k e the estimator work
5 POSTSCRIPT
With details of the actual plant m the
benchmark problem now avadable ( G r a e b e ,
1994), the following c o m m e n t s m a y be m order
(t) The surprisingly good p e r f o r m a n c e obtained
here, considering the slmphctty of the model, is
probably attributable to the plant transfer
function being dominated by a single pole
(u) The n o n - m t m m u m - p h a s e b e h a w o u r ts
unsurpnsmg, smce the plant ~tself m fact has thts
property
(m) Inspection of the control mput m the

Cook
simulation data (not shown here) reveals that
saturation frequently occurred, but only briefly,
followmg changes m the reference signal

REFERENCES
Cook, P A (1989) Direct adaptive control of nonhnear
systems IFAC Symposmm on Nonhnear Control Systems
Design, Capri, Italy, pp 270-273
Cook, P A (1991) Performance of model-reference
adaptive control algorithms under non-~deal conditions
International Conference on Control '91 Edmburgh, U K
IEE Conference Publication No 232, pp 533-538
Cook, P A (1992) Robustness of direct adaptive control
systems with slow samphng In N K Nichols and D H
Owens (Eds), The Mathematics of Control Theory, pp
205-214 Oxford Umverslty Press, Oxford
Goodwin, G C, P J Ramadge and P E Calnes (1980)
Discrete-time multlvarlable adaptive control IEEE Trans
Automat Control, AC-25, 449-456
Graebe, S F (1994) Robust and adaptive control of an
unknown plant a benchmark of new format Automauca,
3O

Ioannou, P A and P V Kokotovic (1984) Robust redesign

of adaptive control IEEE Trans Automat Control,
AC-29, 202-211
Kreisselmeler, G and B D O Anderson (1986) Robust
model reference adaptive control 1EEE Trans Automat
Control, AC-31, 127-132
Ortega, R , L Praly and I D Landau (1985) Robustness of
discrete-time adapt,ve controllers 1EEE Trans Automat
Control, AC-3O, 1179-1187