Application of multi-model switching predictive functional control on the temperature system of an electric heating furnace

A method of multi-model switching based predictive functional control is proposed and applied to the temperature control system of an electric heating furnace. The control strategies provide the effective and independent control modes of the electric heating furnace temperature in order to obtain improved control performance. The method depends on conventional implementation of the multi-model switching state, which requires some endeavors to tune the switching model in the model predictive control and allows a reduction of the calculation compared with the weighted multiple model algorithms. In order to test the advantage of the proposed method, experimental equipment is set up and experiments are done on the temperature process of a heating furnace, which verify the validity and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. •A switching predictive functional control (FPFC) is presented.•Predictive functional control and switching strategy are combined to form a multimode PFC strategy.•The temperature process control of a heating furnace model is illustrated