Knowledge based tools for the design of servo-hydraulic closed loop control

The design process of hydraulic drives requires a lot of knowledge and experience although many computer tools are available that aid in various aspects of the design. One of these aspects is the selection of a suitable control strategy and its parameterisation. While being a significant key for the performance of servo-hydraulic drives it is nevertheless often neglected because of lack of knowledge in control theory. Only for very demanding applications design engineers use specialised and often complex simulation programs to analyse the system’s static and dynamic behaviour prior to its implementation. Also application engineers need assistance in applying and tuning controllers that use more advanced control concepts taking user-defined constraints into account such as the performance of the given hardware. Starting from observations of the general design process of hydraulic drives and an overview about which design steps are already computer supported, results of a literature search about knowledge based control design approaches for hydraulic drives are presented and evaluated in this paper.