Distributed Intelligence Systems 1991

Containing 41 papers, this volume focuses on recent advances in the field of intelligent systems.

Distributed computer control is at the intersection between control engineering and computer science. Containing 22 papers, this book provides an up-to-date reference source of important issues in the design and implementation of distributed real-time computer systems.

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.

Intelligent Manufacturing is a new disciplinary field which applies computer science, artificial intelligence, mechanical engineering and systems science to industrial manufacturing processes. This book presents a new integration architecture for implementing real-time distributed intelligent manufacturing systems.

Presents the philosophy, methodology, techniques, and applications of IDIS for engineering design. Looks at recent research, and details a five-step problem-solving strategy of problem definition, conceptual design, parameter design, design analysis, and design evaluation. Describes industrial applications of IDIS, including the design of a mechanical transmission, a heat exchanger network, and a process control system. For graduate courses on engineering design, artificial intelligence, and computer integrated manufacturing. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Productivity enhancement is a major concern for all manufacturing enterprises. Productivity enhancement can be achieved in many ways and many facets of its problems have been investigated over the last decades. A number of methods, tools and technologies have emerged to efficiently increase productivity and rationalize management of manufacturing enterprises. International experts from both academia and industry share their experiences in this collection of articles, contributing to the latest advances in the many facets of productivity enhancement in manufacturing enterprises. Themes and visions are detailed on factories of the future, new management approaches, manufacturing system integration and manufacturing information systems. These technical areas can be grouped into four major sections: Factories of the future; Techniques and tools for automated manufacturing; Robotics; and Industrial applications. The papers illustrate a pattern of valuable and interesting approaches to the fascinating problem of designing a new generation of robots with high enough performance capabilities to be used in an industrial context.

Computer scientists have long appreciated that the relationship between algorithms and architecture is crucial. Broadly speaking the more specialized the architecture is to a particular algorithm then the more efficient will be the computation. The penalty is that the architecture will become useless for computing anything other than that algorithm. This message holds for the algorithms used in real-time automatic control as much as any other field. These Proceedings will provide researchers in this field with a useful up-to-date reference source of recent developments.

This volume contains 40 papers which describe the recent developments in advanced control of chemical processes and related industries. The topics of adaptive control, model-based control and neural networks are covered by 3 survey papers. New adaptive, statistical, model-based control and artificial intelligence techniques and their applications are detailed in several papers. The problem of implementation of control algorithms on a digital computer is also considered.