Design And Implementation Of Intelligent Manufacturing Systems From Expert Systems Neural Networks To Fuzzy Logic

The introduction of artificial intelligence, neural networks, and fuzzy logic into industry has given a new perspective to manufacturing processes in the U.S. and abroad. To help readers keep pace, this book addresses topics of intelligent manufacturing from a variety of theoretical, empirical, design, and implementation perspectives.

This is the eBook version of the printed book. If the print book includes a CD-ROM, this content is not included within the eBook version. The introduction of artificial intelligence, neural networks, and fuzzy logic into industry has given a new perspective to manufacturing processes in the U.S. and abroad. To help readers keep pace, this book addresses topics of intelligent manufacturing from a variety of theoretical, empirical, design, and implementation perspectives.

The quest for building systems that can function automatically has attracted a lot of attention over the centuries and created continuous research activities. As users of these systems we have never been satisfied, and demand more from the artifacts that are designed and manufactured. The current trend is to build autonomous systems that can adapt to changes in their environment. While there is a lot to be done before we reach this point, it is not possible to separate manufacturing systems from this trend. The desire to achieve fully automated manufacturing systems is here to stay. Manufacturing systems of the twenty-first century will demand more flexibility in product design, process planning, scheduling and process control. This may well be achieved through integrated software and hardware archi tectures that generate current decisions based on information collected from manufacturing systems environment, and execute these decisions by converting them into signals transferred through communication network. Manufacturing technology has not yet reached this state. However, the urge for achieving this goal is transferred into the term 'Intelligent Systems' that we started to use more in late 1980s. Knowledge-based systems, our first efforts in this endeavor, were not sufficient to generate the 'Intelligence' required - our quest still continues. Artificial neural network technology is becoming an integral part of intelligent manufacturing systems and will have a profound impact on the design of autonomous engineering systems over the next few years.

Soft computing is a consortium of computing methodologies that provide a foundation for the conception, design, and deployment of intelligent systems and aims to formalize the human ability to make rational decisions in an environment of uncertainty and imprecision. This book is based on a NATO Advanced Study Institute held in 1996 on soft computing and its applications. The distinguished contributors consider the principal constituents of soft computing, namely fuzzy logic, neurocomputing, genetic computing, and probabilistic reasoning, the relations between them, and their fusion in industrial applications. Two areas emphasized in the book are how to achieve a synergistic combination of the main constituents of soft computing and how the combination can be used to achieve a high Machine Intelligence Quotient.

Despite the large volume of publications devoted to neural networks, fuzzy logic, and evolutionary programming, few address the applications of computational intelligence in design and manufacturing. Computational Intelligence in Manufacturing Handbook fills this void as it covers the most recent advances in this area and state-of-the-art applications. This comprehensive handbook contains an excellent balance of tutorials and new results, that allows you to: obtain current information understand technical details assess research potentials, and define future directions of the field Manufacturing applications play a leading role in progress, and this handbook gives you a ready reference to guide you easily through these developments.