Artificial Intelligence In Real Time Control 1994

Artificial Intelligence is one of the new technologies that has contributed to the successful development and implementation of powerful and friendly control systems. These systems are more attractive to end-users shortening the gap between control theory applications. The IFAC Symposia on Artificial Intelligence in Real Time Control provides the forum to exchange ideas and results among the leading researchers and practitioners in the field. This publication brings together the papers presented at the latest in the series and provides a key evaluation of present and future developments of Artificial Intelligence in Real Time Control system technologies.

The symposium had two main aims, to investigate the state-of-the-art in the application of artificial intelligence techniques in real-time control, and to bring together control system specialists, artificial intelligence specialists and end-users. Many professional engineers working in industry feel that the gap between theory and practice in applying control and systems theory is widening, despite efforts to develop control algorithms. Papers presented at the meeting ranged from the theoretical aspects to the practical applications of artificial intelligence in real-time control. Themes were: the methodology of artificial intelligence techniques in control engineering; the application of artificial intelligence techniques in different areas of control; and hardware and software requirements. This symposium showed that there exist alternative possibilities for control based on artificial intelligence techniques.

Increasingly, over the last few years, intelligent controllers have been incorporated into control systems. Presently, the numbers and types of intelligent controllers that contain variations of fuzzy logic, neural network, genetic algorithms or some other forms of knowledge based reasoning technology are dramatically rising. However, considering the stability of the system, when such controllers are included it is difficult to analyse and predict system behaviour under unexpected conditions. Leading researchers and industrial practitioners were able to discuss and evaluate current development and future research directions at the first IFAC International Workshop on safety, reliability and applications on emerging intelligent control technology. This publication contains the papers, covering a wide range of topics, presented at the workshop.

This Proceedings contains the papers presented at the 9th IFAC AIRTC'2000 Symposium on Artificial Intelligence in Real-Time Control 2000, held at Budapest Polytechnic, Hungary, on 2 - 4 October. AIRTC'2000 builds on the excellent reputation of previous meetings in the series for providing top-quality papers in this important research field. A positive development illustrated by this Proceedings is a new trend towards pragmatism in the research field. Examples of this trend are: an increase in the number of actual industrial applications; support for more widespread use of new sophisticated technologies (e.g. materials design); further intertwining of artificial intelligence and control theory methods that reduces the reliance on blind faith, still too often associated with AI methods. Many things have changed since the first AIRTC event in 1988. Two examples illustrate the change in the general attitude of the IFAC family: in 1990, one of the major closing presentations of the IFAC World Congress warned the control community about the coming hordes of AI people. In 1999, one of the plenary papers at the IFAC World Congress pointed out that the AI based methods form a natural extension of control theory to the class of non-linear systems with incomplete information (at least as far as the optimisation is concerned). This contrast in attitudes shows how, during the past decade, many AI people have embraced control theory and many control people have learned the basics of AI. This Proceedings serves to continue this excellent dialogue, by providing many quality papers which link both fields.

This set of proceedings contains the most significant papers presented at the third IFAC Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in Real-time Control, which was held from September 23-25, 1991 in the USA. In this workshop, although there were still some "exotic" applications, a more practical view of the applications and limitations of current AI technology dominated the participants' discussions. With its resultant focus on reliability and safety considerations, the workshop posed as many questions as it answered. It provides an excellent mirror of the current state-of-the-art which these proceedings are intended to illustrate.

The Sixth International IFAC Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in Real-Time Control was held in Slovenia in 1995 and provided a forum for leading researchers and practitioners in this field to exchange ideas and results. This postprint volume from the workshop contains all the papers presented there and features five plenary lectures by distinguished control/artificial intelligence scientists. The approaches covered in the papers include fuzzy control, artifical neural networks, expert systems and machine learning whilst the Technical Programme highlights a vareity of methods from artifical intelligence fields applied for control problems.