SYSTEM ORIENTED NEURAL NETWORKS — PROBLEM FORMULATION, METHODOLOGY AND APPLICATION

A novel methodology is proposed for the development of neural network models for complex engineering systems exhibiting nonlinearity by first establishing some fundamental nonlinear functions from a priori engineering knowledge, then constructed and coded into appropriate chromosome representations.

Abstract

A novel methodology is proposed for the development of neural network models for complex engineering systems exhibiting nonlinearity. This method performs neural network modeling by first establishing some fundamental nonlinear functions from a priori engineering knowledge, which are then constructed and coded into appropriate chromosome representations. Given a suitable fitness function, using evolutionary approaches such as genetic algorithms, a population of chromosomes evolves for a certain number of generations to finally produce a neural network model best fitting the system data. The objective is to improve the transparency of the neural networks, i.e. to produce physically meaningful "white box" neural network model with better generalization performance. In this paper, the problem formulation, the neural network configuration, and the associated optimization software are discussed in detail. This methodology is then applied to a practical real-world system to illustrate its effectiveness.