Knowledge - based Systems for Industrial Control *

THIS BOOK IS A compilation of texts presented by a large number of British authors at an lEE Vacation School for engineers from industry and academia held at the University of Strathclyde, U.K. in September 1990. Artificial intelligence techniques are expected to hold much potential for industrial control systems in the years to come. This is a fascinating and emerging area in which people from many disciplines (control engineering, artificial intelligence, software engineering, knowledge engineering) work together. Various successful applications have already been reported and persons using, and vending, control systems for practical applications in the process industry are interested and attracted by these new techniques. This is mainly because these methods seem to correspond to the daily practice and experience of process engineers and operators. The attention, though, being paid to these methods by the control theory community is astonishingly low, although the methods seem to be able to solve some of the most difficult problems in control engineering (highly nonlinear systems, systems with large delay times, partly unknown systems). Until now, the official IFAC Journal Automatica has also given little attention to knowledge-based systems, although various workshops and symposia related to these subjects have been organized. Therefore, a book such as this, contributing to the field of knowledge-based systems should be very welcome in the control engineering community. What, then, is the reason for the fast proliferation and growing interest in artificial intelligence methods in control engineering? A number of factors have influenced this: