Fuzzy Logic-Based Techniques for Modeling the Correlation between the Weld Bead Dimension and the Process Parameters in MIG Welding

Abstract

Fuzzy logic-based techniques have been developed to model input-output relationships of metal inert gas (MIG) welding process. Both conventional and hierarchical fuzzy logic controllers (FLCs) of Mamdani type have been developed, and their performances are compared. The conventional FLC suffers from the curse of dimensionality for handling a large number of variables, and a hierarchical FLC was proposed earlier to tackle this problem. However, in that study, both the structure and knowledge base of the FLC were not optimized simultaneously, which has been attempted here. Simultaneous optimization of the structure and knowledge base is a difficult task, and to solve it, a genetic algorithm (GA) will have to deal with the strings having varied lengths. A new scheme has been proposed here to tackle the problem related to crossover of two parents with unequal lengths. It is interesting to observe that the conventional FLC yields the best accuracy in predictions, whereas the hierarchical FLC can be computationally faster than others but at the cost of accuracy. Moreover, there is no improvement of interpretability by introducing a hierarchical fuzzy system. Thus, there exists a trade-off between the accuracy obtained in predictions and computational complexity of various FLCs.