Expert and knowledge-based systems hold significant promise for industrial control, especially in process industries. Recognizing the importance of this field, the Institution of Electrical Engineers organized a Vacation School at the University of Strathclyde in September 1990, bringing together engineers from both industry and academia.
This course—and the resulting book—addresses four main topics: the foundations of knowledge-based control, artificial intelligence, the application of expert knowledge, and deductive control.
The book begins by presenting knowledge-based control from the perspectives of systems engineering and information technology, and introduces artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic to provide a solid foundation for the material that follows.
It explores the role of fuzzy control, discusses expert systems in self-tuning control, and describes the use of real-time knowledge-based systems in fermentation supervisory control. The impact of neural networks on process modeling is also examined. The development and application of COGSYS, an environment for building expert systems, is detailed, including its use in a gas processing plant.
Additional case studies cover condition monitoring, the development of qualitative models for physical systems—a topic of growing interest in the AI community—and the design of multivariable control systems, along with other aspects of process control.
