  Electromechanical switching devices, such as solenoid valves, contactors, and
relays, suffer from undesirable phenomena like clicking, mechanical wear, and
contact bounce. Despite that, they are still widely used in industry due to
their various economic and technical advantages. This has encouraged the
development of controllers aimed at reducing the collisions that occur at the
end of the switching operations. One of the most successful approaches has been
the use of iterative techniques. However, these algorithms typically require a
large number of operations to converge, which is definitely a clear drawback.
This paper presents a strategy to improve the convergence rate of such
controllers. Our proposal, which is based on the sensitivity of the control law
with respect to the parameters, assumes that the performance of the system is
more heavily affected by some parameters than others. Thus, by avoiding
movements in the directions that have less impact, the search algorithm is
expected to drive the system to near-optimal behaviors using fewer operations.
Results obtained by simulation show significant improvement in the convergence
rate of a state-of-the-art run-to-run feedforward controller, which
demonstrates the high potential of the proposal.
