From Data to Control: A Two-Stage Simulation-Based Approach

For many industrial processes, a digital twin is available, which is essentially a highly complex model whose parameters may not be properly tuned for the specific process. By relying on the availability of such a digital twin, this paper introduces a novel approach to data-driven control, where the digital twin is used to generate samples and suitable controllers for various perturbed versions of its parameters. A supervised learning algorithm is then employed to estimate a direct mapping from the data to the best controller to use. This map consists of a model reduction step, followed by a neural network architecture whose output provides the parameters of the controller. The data-to-controller map is pre-computed based on artificially generated data, but its execution once deployed is computationally very efficient, thus providing a simple and inexpensive way to tune and re-calibrate controllers directly from data. The benefits of this novel approach are illustrated via numerical simulations.