Available online at www.sciencedirect.

com

Expert Systems with Applications

Expert Systems with Applications 36 (2009) 716723 www.elsevier.com/locate/eswa

Expert system based adaptive dynamic matrix control for ball mill grinding circuit
Xi-song Chen *, Shi-hua Li, Jun-yong Zhai, Qi Li
School of Automation, Southeast University, SiPaiLou 2#, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province 210096, China

Abstract Ball mill grinding circuit is a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system characterized with couplings and nonlinearities. Stable control of grinding circuit is usually interrupted by great disturbances, such as ore hardness and feed particle size, etc. Conventional model predictive control usually cannot capture the nonlinearities caused by the disturbances in real practice. Multiple models based adaptive dynamic matrix control (ADMC) is proposed for the control of ball mill grinding circuit. The novelty of the strategy lies in that intelligent expert system is developed to identify the current ore hardness and then select a proper model for ADMC. Compared with the various nonlinear DMC strategies, the approach can synthesize and analyze as many variables and status as possible to adequately and reliably identify the process conditions, and it does not introduce additional computational complexity, which makes it readily available to the industrial practitioner. Simulation results and industrial applications demonstrate the eectiveness and practicality of this control strategy. 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Expert system; Adaptive dynamic matrix control; Multiple models; Ore hardness; Grinding circuit

1. Introduction Ball mill grinding circuits are the most important mineral processing units in concentrator plants, and the product particle size of grinding circuits greatly aects minerals recovery and the nal tailing discharge. Ball mill grinding circuit is essentially a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system characterized with couplings, nonlinearities and large time delays. Stable control of grinding circuit is usually interrupted by great disturbances, such as the changes in ore hardness and feed particle size, etc. which brings great diculties to process control. Many research papers have been published on the development of control strategies for grinding circuits. These control methods involve decentralized PID control and model predictive control (MPC) (Pomerleau, Hodouin, Desbiens, & Gagnon, 2000; Ramasamy, Narayanan, &
*

Corresponding author. E-mail address: chenxisong@263.net (X.-s. Chen).

Rao, 2005), multivariable control (Duarte et al., 1999), robust control (Galan, Barton, & Romagndi, 2002), supervisory control (Radhakrishnan, 1999) and neurocontrol (Conradle & Aldrich, 2001). Although numerous advanced control strategies have been reported in control literatures, both at simulation, as well as experimental levels, very few of these currently operate in industry due to the complex process dynamics and severe disturbances in grinding circuits. In fact, PID control strategies are still widely used at the regulatory level in the control of grinding circuits at present. However, for the grinding circuits that with strong couplings, MPC should be employed due to its prominent features of decoupling capabilities (Ramasamy et al., 2005). Dynamic matrix control (DMC) (Cutler & Ramaker, 1980) is the most popular MPC algorithm applied in process control compared with the other various model predictive controllers. The vast majority of DMC applications are based on linear dynamic models referred to as linear DMC schemes. Each of the linear DMC schemes employs

0957-4174/$ - see front matter 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2007.10.008

X.-s. Chen et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 36 (2009) 716723

717

an explicit model to predict the future behavior of the process over an extended prediction horizon. The application of linear DMC has its limitations when model mismatches exist because the accuracy of the model has signicant eect on the performance of the closed-loop system (Gopinath, Bequette, Roy, Kaufman, & Yu, 1995). When the process is highly nonlinear, just one step response model generated at a particular operating point cannot capture all the dynamic and static characteristics of all the operating regions. If there is large modeling error of the controller, the closed-loop response is very poor, even the stability cannot be guaranteed. Strategy based on multiple linear models is an eective way to represent nonlinear process. The multiple model method is rst and now widely adopted in adaptive control and has obtained great success in real process applications (Lainiotis, 1971; Chen & Narendra, 2002). It is also possible to adopt multiple model strategies in MPC scheme (Dougherty & Cooper, 2003; Zhao, Xia, Wang, Gu, & Jin, 2003; Aufderheide & Bequette, 2003). Although multiple model method is a useful way to deal with nonlinear process, development of a suitable model switching algorithm for multiple models based adaptive DMC (ADMC) is not an easy task. The objective of model switching algorithm is to select the correct model from a set of candidate control models, which captures sucient static and dynamic process aspects at the local operating point. In most of the multiple models based adaptive control, switching algorithms are based on the errors of the controlled variables (Chen & Narendra, 2002; Dougherty & Cooper, 2003; Zhao et al., 2003). However, in many of the multivariable processes, besides controlled variables, manipulated variables and some other variables or status could also be utilized to help correctly identify the current conditions. As we all know, experienced operators do not depend only on the controlled variables but synthesize and analyze as much status as possible to get a proper decision. If only the controlled variables are considered, misinterpretations may be caused due to insucient data analysis, which will bring great risks for on-line control. Moreover, in a complex process like grinding circuit, conventional method shows its drawbacks to analytically handle nonlinearity and uncertainty factors by mathematical models. On the contrary, complex relationships among the factors can be expressed by rule models. In grinding circuit, there is in fact a real need for intelligent control design methods that can deal with rather vague and sometimes verbal descriptions of the process. Much knowledge, in plant practice, might be available in many forms, such as operator experience, reports, and recorded data. Knowledge-based control that can capture human experience and other forms of soft knowledge and use them in a reasoning framework would be quite desirable for many control process applications. One of the most reliable control types for multivariable and complex process is expert system. It is a very practical technique in the eld of articial intelligence, and has been

widely used in process control (Mohamed & Sayed, 1998; Hrncirik, Nahlik, & Vovsik, 2002; Zhou, Guo, & Christine, 2004). The novelty of this work lies in that intelligent expert system is developed to identify the current ore hardness and then select a proper model for ADMC, which can employ as many variables and status as possible to adequately and reliably identify the process conditions in case of misinterpretations. Compared with the various nonlinear DMC strategies, such as neural networks based DMC, ADMC is straightforward and convenient for online use without increasing the computational complexity of the control algorithm. In this paper, an adaptive dynamic matrix control (ADMC) strategy based on expert system for ball mill grinding circuit is developed. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: A model of ball mill grinding circuit with three-inputs and three-outputs is constructed in Section 2. Multiple models based adaptive strategy combined with expert system is described in detail in Section 3. Simulation study is carried out in Section 4, and an industrial application with the new control scheme in an iron ore concentrator plant is illustrated in Section 5. Conclusions are given in Section 6. 2. Process description and modeling 2.1. Process description The ball mill grinding circuit studied here operates in a closed-loop as shown in Fig. 1, including a ball mill, a spiral classier and associated solids feeding conveyors. It is also a typical process in many concentrator plants. When ball mill works, the coarse ore is fed into the mill together with water. The tumbling action of the balls within the revolving mill crushes the feed to ner sizes. The slurry containing the ne product is discharged from the mill to a spiral classier for classication. The slurry is separated into two streams: an overow stream containing the ner particles as product and circulating load containing the larger particles. The latter is recycled back to the ball mill for regrinding. Product particle size is the nal and most important controlled variable in a grinding circuit. Mine ore has to

Ore Ball mill Mill feed water Dilution water

classifier

Circulating load

Overflow

Fig. 1. Process diagram of a grinding circuit.

718

X.-s. Chen et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 36 (2009) 716723

be ground to a size called the liberation size that the imbedded mineral particles are exposed for eective recovery in the following otation process. It should be pointed out that grinding to a size much smaller than the liberation size may also bring some disadvantages. Besides the higher power consumed in grinding, too ne particles or slimes are dicult to be recovered, which will also produce larger volume of tailing discharge in the subsequent concentration and ltration process. Great disturbances exist in grinding circuit operation, such as changes in ore hardness and feed ore particle size, etc. Variations in ore hardness and feed size may cause the mass ow rate of the classier overow and particle size distribution to experience continuous uctuations. Increased fresh ore hardness, for example, can easily lead to a steady increase in circulating load which consequently causes mill overload or a mill circuit overload. In order to counteract the eects of these disturbances, a basic circuit usually has a minimum of two manipulated variables, namely fresh ore feed rate and dilution water ow rate (Conradle & Aldrich, 2001). The main technical parameters of the grinding circuit are shown in Table 1.

K 1 e s1 s T 1s 1 K 2 es2 s 1 K 3 es3 s G12 s T 2 s 1T 3 s 1 K 4 es4 s 1 K 5 es5 s G13 s T 4 s 1T 5 s 1 K6 es6 s G21 s T 6s 1 K7 es7 s G22 s T 7s 1 K 8 es8 s G23 s T 8 s 1T 9 s 1 K 9 es9 s G31 s T 10 s 1 K 10 es10 s G32 s T 11 s 1T 12 s 1 K 11 es11 s G33 s T 13 s 1 G11 s

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

2.2. Process modeling In order to get a better control performance, three controlled variables are selected, i.e. product particle size, mill solids concentration and circulating load. Three manipulated variables are available: the fresh feed rate, mill feed water ow rate and sump dilution water ow rate. Many experiments have been conducted in the process to show the relation between manipulated variables and controlled variables. The grinding circuit model can be written as 2 3 2 32 3 G11 s G12 s G13 s F f s S p s 6 7 6 76 7 1 4 Dm s 5 4 G21 s G22 s G23 s 54 F m s 5 F c s G31 s G32 s G33 s F d s

where Sp, Dm, Fc, Ff, Fm and Fd denote product particle size, mill solids concentration, circulating load, fresh ore feed rate, mill feed water ow rate and dilution water ow rate, respectively. The elements Gij(s) (1 6 i 6 3, 1 6 j 6 3) identied at the operating point have the following general form of transfer functions:
Table 1 Main technical parameters of the grinding circuit Fresh ore feed particle size Ball mill Spiral classier Required product particle size Circulating load Mill solids concentration 614 mm Grid u2700 3600 mm u2400 mm 72 2%(74 lm or 200 mesh) 140180 t/h 6878%

Experiments show that strong couplings exist in this process. That means when one controlled variable is regulated with one manipulated variable, the other two controlled variables will be inevitably inuenced in an undesired fashion. Conventional PID strategies cannot maintain a longterm stable control in the grinding circuit, while DMC scheme is much suitable to this case. Besides multivariable control loop interactions, the process represents a challenging control problem due to its modest nonlinear dynamic behavior caused by the great disturbances. In the plant studied, the ore is rst crushed and screened before it is fed to ball mills and then the uctuations of feed ore particle size are limited to a smaller range. The change in ore hardness has become the main uncontrollable disturbance and should be well detected for a long-time stable control. As mentioned above, multivariable models can be used to approximate the nonlinearities of a process, and the accuracy of the nonlinear approximation can be increased by combining more models (Dougherty & Cooper, 2003). However, this is expensive because modeling is a hard and time consuming work in real practice. As shown in Table 2, three dierent levels M1, M2 and M3 referring to low, medium and high ore hardness, are employed. The number of DMC process models adopted here is determined by the process technologists in the concentrator plant. Although only three levels of process models are employed, the method can be expanded to include as many local models as the practitioner would like. While three levels will often not capture the severe nonlinear behaviors associated with many grinding processes, it will provide signicant benet over the conventional DMC controllers. As shown in Table 2, each of the nine transfer functions has dierent parameter values in each level Mi (1 6 i 6 3). The dead time si (1 6 i 6 11) keeps almost unchanged regardless of the changes in ore hardness, while the process

X.-s. Chen et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 36 (2009) 716723 Table 2 Model parameters of grinding circuit Model parameters K1 K2 K3 K4 K5 K6 K7 K8 K9 K10 K11 T1 T2 T3 T4 T5 T6 T7 T8 T9 T10 T11 T12 T13 M1 2.60 1.65 1.09 2.13 1.07 1.35 3.11 1.39 1.01 0.31 3.30 81 114 189 19 39 107 116 74 179 121 110 252 150 M2 2.85 1.87 1.09 2.32 1.07 1.57 3.46 1.55 1.14 0.38 3.59 95 140 210 21 47 130 130 85 190 140 130 270 180 M3 3.19 2.16 1.09 2.53 1.07 1.74 3.94 1.73 1.39 0.43 3.87 110 162 241 25 54 152 152 95 204 160 151 293 204

719

matrices representing the relative importance of each controlled and manipulated variable. The fact that DMC adopts only one single step response model generated at one particular operating point demonstrates that this linear model will become less representative of the current process conditions as process operating regions change due to disturbances or operating point variations, which will result in a degraded closed-loop response. Therefore, a multiple models based adaptive DMC is presented here to improve the closed-loop performance. The general schematic diagram of ADMC for ball mill grinding circuit is shown in Fig. 2, and the internal structure of ADMC is shown in Fig. 3. As shown in Fig. 3, the structure of ADMC diers from that of DMC in that a single model in DMC is replaced by a model bank in ADMC. 3.2. Expert system based model switching strategy Up to present, on-line ore hardness instrument for process control is not yet available in the market. Ore hardness can only be sampled manually and sent to laboratories for analysis. Since there is absent of on-line measurable information of disturbances, adaptive model switching algorithm has to be designed according to the changes in the process variables to track the operating point variation of the nonlinear grinding circuit. Because of the complexities and risks that mentioned before, an expert system has been developed that mimic the condition recognition of an experienced operator to identify the current ore hardness and then get a required model for ADMC. This expert system makes use of a set of operational rules, which are collected by the process engineers and veteran operators over a long period of time. It is composed of a knowledge base, a database, an inference engine, a control and communication interface

gains Ki (1 6 i 6 11) may change as much as 30% over the range of operation studied in this case. Also, time constants Ti (1 6 i 6 13) change by more than 30%. Both of them show the nonlinear behaviors in the grinding circuit. The control performance will degrade if only a single model based DMC is employed. 3. Expert system based ADMC for grinding circuits 3.1. Structure of ADMC for grinding circuits Single model based DMC scheme is based on the step response model, consisting of reference trajectory, rolling optimization, feedback correction and predictive model. At any sampling instant, given a reasonably accurate predictive model and the desired future closed-loop behavior (or a reference trajectory), plan the set of future control moves in such a way that the predictive output is as close to the reference trajectory as possible. DMC is based on real-time optimization of a cost function (Cutler & Ramaker, 1980), written as J k
P P

ore Vibratory conveyor

Fc

Dm

Ball mill
Ff Fm

Mill feed water Dilution water

Circulating load

j1

b y k j rk j Qb y k j rk j Duk j 1 RDuk j 1 11
T

M P

j1

Adaptive DMC

Fd

Classifier Overflow To floatation

Sp

where b y k ; rk , and Du(k) are vectors of predicted outputs, reference trajectories, and changes in manipulated variables at time k, respectively, P is the prediction horizon, M is the control horizon, Q and R are weighting

Fig. 2. General schematic diagram of ADMC for a ball mill grinding circuit.

720

X.-s. Chen et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 36 (2009) 716723

Reference trajectory

Rolling Optimization

Grinding circuit Expert system based model switching stategy

Model bank M1 M2

Mn Feedback correction
Fig. 3. Internal structure of ADMC.

and a user interface. The expert system structure for model switching strategy is shown in Fig. 4. As shown in Fig. 4, the database stores process data from on-line measurement. It also stores the quality requirements, statistical data and reasoning results from the inference engine, etc. The inference engine acquires data from the database, and then uses both the knowledge in the knowledge base and a reasoning strategy that combines forward chaining and model based reasoning to determine the current condition. The knowledge base stores the rule models, steady state mathematical models, empirical data, calculation laws, etc. The main empirical knowledge culled from engineers and operators to identify ore hardness are illustrated as follows: Empirical knowledge 1#: If product particle size is coarse and circulating load is high, this is the typical condition reecting higher ore hardness.

Empirical knowledge 2#: On the contrary, if product particle size is ne and circulating is low, ore with low hardness is in processing. Empirical knowledge 3#: Product solids concentration can be used together with product particle size to identify ore hardness. If solids concentration is low while particle size is coarse, increased ore hardness can be determined. On the contrary, there exists decreased ore hardness. Empirical knowledge 4#: Mill acoustic emission should be measured to identify the internal working condition of a ball mill (Apelt, Asprey, & Thornhill, 2002). If ore hardness is relatively high, the residence time in a ball mill will be longer, which may lead to a mill overload condition, and the mill acoustic intensities will decrease. Empirical knowledge 5#: If ore hardness turns lower, the ore can be easily ground to ne particles and the discharge will speed up, and the acoustic intensity will increase.

Inference engine -Forward chaining -Model-based reasoning

Control and communication interface Model switching for ADMC

Knowledge base -Rule models -Mathematical models -Empirical knowledge and data -Operating laws -Calculating laws, etc. Data base -Quality requirements -Measured data -Statistical data -Reasoning results, etc.

User interface (HMI)

Modification of knowledge base, etc. Display of reasoning results and operating guides, intelligent alarms, etc

Process data

Fig. 4. Expert system structure for model switching strategy.

Experts and operators

X.-s. Chen et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 36 (2009) 716723

721

Empirical knowledge 6#: If fresh ore feed rate is continuously lower than normal while circulating load is higher than normal, ore with high ore hardness is usually in processing. Empirical knowledge 7#: Power draw is a function of load, and can be exploited to estimate mill charge levels (Luo, 1995). However, power draw has a nonlinear relationship with mill charge, that is, with the increase of mill charge, power draw rst rises and then decreases. If ore feed rate and mill feed water are in normal range, while power draw and mill acoustic emission are decreasing, that means the ore hardness is turning harder, etc. Based on these rules, the knowledge base is established by production rules whose basic pattern is IF conditions THEN results, where the condition is a characteristic state of the process or a logic combination of characteristic states and the result is a conclusion. Process variables are fuzzied into 35 values as shown in Table 3, where HH, H, M, L, LL represents highhigh, high, medium, low, and lowlow, respectively. H, M and L are normal control states, while HH and LL are emergency conditions. The main rules of the expert system are shown in Table 4. If the ore hardness is inside the current operating point, the model switching mechanism keeps inactive. If, however, the operating point drifts outside the original one, a switching action is active to make the ADMC to adapt to the new condition. Based on the characteristic states or their logical combinations, the inference engine gets the proper rules from the knowledge base by forward chaining; thereafter it determines the present condition and selects the proper model for ADMC. The main features of the expert system include: (1) Each rule has a dierent priority; if two rules or more are activated simultaneously the rule with the highest priority is executed. (2) A hysteresis is set in case of frequent switching between the neighboring points.

Table 4 Main rules of the expert system Rule no. R1 R2 R3 R4 R5 R6 R7 R8 R9 R10 R11 Priority 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Condition IF Sp < L and Fc > H IF Sp > H and Fc < L IF Sp < L and Do < M IF Sp > H and Do > M IF Ff = L and Fc > M IF Ff = H and Fc < M IF Fm = M and 0Dm > H and Am < L IF Sp = M and Fd > H and Fc > H IF Sp = M and Fd < L and Fc < L IF Ff = M and Fm = M and Am < M and Pd < M and Ho = H IF Sp = M and Fc = M and Dm = M Ore hardness identied Ho = H Ho = L Ho = H Ho = L Ho = H Ho = L Ho = H Ho = H Ho = L

Ho = M

(3) Switching algorithm is executed every 15 min. This delay allows process transients to die away that are caused by the corrective step-changes before any new switching actions are made. (4) The variables setpoints, low alarms and high alarms can be changed by the operators. This allows them to retune the controller if there are considerable changes in ore production. 4. Simulation study The following tuning and weighting factors are used while applying the DMC scheme to control the grinding circuit: Prediction horizon P = 30, control horizon M = 5, weights on errors 3 2 1 0 0 7 6 Q 4 0 0:8 0 5 0 0 0: 5 and weights on the manipulated variables 2 3 1 0 0 6 7 R 4 0 0: 5 0 5 0 0 0:5 Note that the weight on particle size is set to a large value of one as the particle size should be more tightly controlled compared with other two controlled variables, and also the weight on fresh feed rate is set to a large value of one because it is not permitted to move too freely in order to maintain a relatively stable production. Based on the new control strategy, the close loop response of three controlled variables, namely product particle size, mill solids concentration and circulating load after a step change in ore hardness is simulated as shown in Fig. 5. Both DMC and ADMC are simulated rst at the level of medium ore hardness and the model M2 is selected. At this level of operation both DMC and ADMC controllers give similar performance as shown in Fig. 5 before 200 s. This is because DMC controller was designed for a level of medium condition.

Table 3 Fuzzied values of variables Product particle size Circulating load Mill solids concentration Fresh ore feed rate Mill feed water owrate Dilution water owrate Product solids concentration Mill acoustic emission Power draw Ore hardness Sp Fc Dm Ff Fm Fd Do Am Pd Ho HH HH HH H H H H H H H H H H M M M M M M M M M M L L L L L L L L L L LL LL LL

HH HH

LL LL

722
80

X.-s. Chen et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 36 (2009) 716723

Mill solids concentration (%solids)

DMC 76 ADMC 72 68 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000

Time (s)

(1)
180

Circulating load (t/h)

DMC 170 ADMC 160 150 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000

Time (s)

(2)

74

DMC ADMC

Particle size (%-200mesh)

72

70 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000

Time (s)

(3)
Fig. 5. Close loop responses of (1) mill solids concentration; (2) circulating load and (3) particle size based on DMC and ADMC after step change in ore hardness.

At 200 s, the level of ore hardness is increased to high. At this level of operation, as shown in Fig. 5, the ADMC controller exhibits better disturbance rejection capabilities. This is because the model parameters for DMC controller are no longer valid. The ADMC controller is able to reject the disturbance quicker and return to its set point faster. As shown by these gures, the ADMC controller is able to maintain better performance at the level of high ore hardness. Similar results can also be achieved at the level of low ore hardness; they are omitted here for space. 5. Industrial application The new strategy based on ADMC was put into service in an iron ore concentrator plant in early October 2006. The main technical parameters of the grinding circuit have been shown in Table 1. DMC scheme based on a three-input three-output model had been used for nearly two years before the implementation of ADMC strategy. Particle size, mill solids concentration and circulating load were chosen as controlled variables, while fresh ore feed rate, mill feed water ow rate

and dilution water ow rate were selected as manipulated variables. The qualied rate of product particle size was kept about 95% under DMC mainly due to the changes in mineral ore hardness and feed particle size, etc. though the performance of DMC had been much improved compared with that of PID or manual control in earlier time. In order to investigate the benets from using the updated control strategy, Table 5 shows the comparison results between the grinding circuit with ADMC and that with DMC in the same concentrator plant. The two grinding circuits run in parallel with the same process. As can be seen, the qualied rate of product particle size has been improved almost 3% during the half years testing time. Table 6 shows the comparison of mill and circuit overload alarm times between DMC and ADMC in these two grinding circuits. As can be seen, the alarm times of ADMC are lower than that of DMC in every month. This owes much to the adaptiveness of the new strategy based on expert system. It can be concluded that the new control strategy has achieved a better stable control of grinding circuit while rejecting process disturbances. Compared with DMC

X.-s. Chen et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 36 (2009) 716723 Table 5 Comparison of running results of product particle size Qualied 2006 2007 rate of October November December January February March product particle size DMC ADMC 94.3% 97.5% 94.8% 97.7% 95.2% 98.3% 94.8% 98.1% 95.4% 98.2% 95.2% 98.3%

723

commissioning in industry. Funding for process modeling and control research is provided by Project 8508002049, Southeast University. References
Apelt, T. A., Asprey, S. P., & Thornhill, N. F. (2002). Inferential measurement of SAG mill parameters III: Inferential model. Minerals Engineering, 15, 10551071. Aufderheide, B., & Bequette, B. W. (2003). Extension of dynamic matrix control to multiple models. Computers and Chemical Engineering, 27, 10791096. Chen, L. J., & Narendra, K. S. (2002). Intelligent control using neural networks and multiple models. In Proceedings of the 41st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Las Vegas, Nevada USA (pp. 13571362). Conradle, A. V. E., & Aldrich, C. (2001). Neurocontrol of a ball mill grinding circuit using evolutionary reinforcement learning. Minerals Engineering, 14, 12771294. Cutler, C.R., & Ramaker, B.L. (1980). Dynamic matrix control A computer control algorithm. In AIChE National Meeting, Houston, TX. Dougherty, D., & Cooper, D. (2003). A practical multiple model adaptive strategy for multivariable model predictive control. Control Engineering Practice, 11, 649664. Duarte, M., Sepulveda, F., Castillo, A., Contreras, A., Lazcano, V., Gimenez, P., et al. (1999). A comparative experimental study of ve multivariable control strategies applied to a grinding plant. Powder Technology, 104, 128. Galan, O., Barton, G. W., & Romagndi, J. A. (2002). Robust control of a SAG mill. Powder Technology, 124, 264271. Gopinath, R., Bequette, B. W., Roy, R. J., Kaufman, H., & Yu, C. (1995). Issues in the design of a multirate model-based controller for a nonlinear drug infusion system. Biotechnology Progress, 11, 318 332. Hrncirik, P., Nahlik, J., & Vovsik, J. (2002). The BIOGENES system for knowledge-based bioprocess control. Expert System with Applications, 23, 145153. Lainiotis, D. G. (1971). Optimal adaptive estimation structure and parameter adaptation. IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 16, 160170. Luo, F. M. (1995). Articial intelligent automatic optimization control strategy and technology of a ball mill. Metal Mine, 233, 2932. Mohamed, A. H., & Sayed, E. L. (1998). Rule based approach for realtime reactive power control in interconnected power systems. Expert System with Applications, 14, 355360. Pomerleau, A., Hodouin, D., Desbiens, A., & Gagnon, E. (2000). A survey of grinding circuit control methods: from decentralized PID controllers to multivariable predictive controllers. Powder Technology, 108, 103115. Radhakrishnan, V. R. (1999). Model based supervisory control of a ball mill grinding circuit. Journal of Process Control, 9, 195211. Ramasamy, M., Narayanan, S. S., & Rao, C. D. P. (2005). Control of ball mill grinding circuit using model predictive control scheme. Journal of Process Control, 15, 273283. Zhao, Z., Xia, X., Wang, J., Gu, J., & Jin, Y. (2003). Nonlinear dynamic matrix control based on multiple operating models. Journal of Process Control, 13, 4156. Zhou, Q. H., Guo, H. H., & Christine, W. C. (2004). Development of an intelligent decision support system for air pollution control at coal-red power plants. Expert System with Applications, 26, 335 356.

Table 6 Comparison of mill and circuit overload alarm times between DMC and ADMC Alarm times DMC ADMC 2006 2007

October November December January February March 5 3 6 3 4 2 7 4 5 2 6 3

scheme implemented before, the control system has fullled the intended purpose. It should be pointed that if more sub-models are employed and a better approximation of the nonlinearities will be acquired, and there will be a hope of more increased control performance in the grinding circuit. 6. Conclusions A multiple model based adaptive dynamic matrix control (ADMC) has been developed and the application and benets of this strategy is demonstrated in a grinding circuit. Three-input three-output model with three dierent levels of ore hardness have been constructed for ADMC. The novelty of the strategy lies in that intelligent expert system is developed to identify the current ore hardness and then select a proper model for ADMC. Compared with the various nonlinear DMC strategies to date, the approach can employ as many variables and status as possible to adequetely and reliably identify the process conditions, and it does not introduce additional computational complexity, which makes it readily available to the industrial practitioner. Compared with the former DMC, the running results of ADMC scheme have demonstrated improved performance while rejecting process disturbances in grinding control. The run results show that the proposed ADMC scheme based on expert system is an eective and practical method to control ball mill grinding circuits. Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the teammates who have contributed to the experimental work and system