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A Reinforcement Learning Control Method for Process Industry Based on Implicit and Explicit Knowledge Extraction and Embedding

delete2025-08-01
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PRE
AI
T
Tianhao Liu
杨春华 (Chunhua Yang)
C
Can Zhou
李永刚 (Yonggang Li)
B
Bei Sun
DOI:10.1109/TSMC.2025.3559766delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
The process industry is a key manufacturing process that consumes a vast amount of energy consumption. On the premise of ensuring process stability, controlling process variables to operate the process close to the optimal working condition plays a critical role in reducing energy consumption. Reinforcement learning (RL), using trial and error to learn control strategies, has received much attention. However, the substantial fluctuations of process variables and the switching delay gap of the process industry result in a high-dimension state-action space, making it difficult to learn control strategies efficiently, and there is no guarantee of control stability. To get around these issues, first, a generic knowledge-extracted method for process industry RL control is proposed. It does not require laborious expert knowledge acquisition processes. Second, to improve learning efficiency, the implicit knowledge is extracted using decision trees from operation trajectory data and embedded into agent controllers. Third, an explicit knowledge-oriented reward constructing method is designed to guarantee control stability. A case of the zinc electrowinning process is provided to validate its superiority. The result shows that it can reduce power consumption while stabilizing process variables within the spec limits, without a laborious expert knowledge acquisition process.
Keywords:
Knowledge embedding
optimal control
process industry
reinforcement learning (RL)

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics cover
IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics
IF:
10.5
Papers:
1.1W
Citations:
5.0W

Organization

C
Central South University
Scholars:
10.0W
Papers: 7.2W
Citations: 10.9W