A novel hierarchical temperature control method of an electric oven and its experimental evaluation

Purpose Ovens are semi-industrial multipurpose equipment that are used to provide a desired temperature for specific chemical processes. Temperature regulation in the presence of different type of disturbances and dealing with nonlinear dynamics with large dead time (up to a few minutes) are some undesirable factors that have to be considered in the controller design procedure of the oven systems. Due to these factors, the classical PID controller tuned using Cohen-Coon or Ziegler–Nichol’s tuning methods often fails to meet satisfactory closed-loop performance. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, to deal with the limitations on the oven system due to the undesirable factors, a hierarchical automaton-guided form controller has been designed. The proposed controller includes several discrete PI controllers, each of which operates locally in the defined operating regions whose separation idea is specific to this paper. Based on the idea proposed in the separation of regions, the controller’s coefficients tuning rules are extracted prior to any determination. Then, a supervisor controller has assumed the task of switching between local controllers. In the next step, by considering a conceptual model for the oven system and using a candidate Lyapunov function, the stability conditions of closed-loop system are discussed and the necessary conditions for the asymptotic stability are derived. The proposed controller is practically implemented with the help of the Arduino Nano platform. Findings Using several experiments, the superiority of the proposed hierarchical controller in terms of performance and energy consumption has been demonstrated. Originality/value The proposed hierarchical controller has been implemented practically and an acceptable closed-loop performance has been achieved. To illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method, the closed-loop stability of this method is shown using the Lyapunov theory.