Intelligent Engineering Systems
Authors: Rudas Imre J. ,   Institute of Mathematical and Computational Science John von Neumann Faculty of Informatics Budapest PolytechnicH1081 Budapest, Nepszinhaz u. 8, Hungary Tel. +36-1-210-2540 Fax: +36-1-333-9183
Published: April 2016

The "information revolution" of our time affects our entire generation. While a vision of the "Information Society," with its financial, legal, business, privacy, and other aspects has emerged in the past few years, the "traditional scene" of information technology, that is, industrial automation, maintained its significance as a field of unceasing development. Since the old-fashioned concept of "Hard Automation" applicable only to industrial processes of fixed, repetitive nature and manufacturing large batches of the same product1)was thrust to the background by keen market competition, the key element of this development remained the improvement of "Machine Intelligence". In spite of the fact that L. A. Zadeh already introduced the concept of "Machine Intelligence Quotient" in 1996 to measure machine intelligence2) , this term remained more or less of a mysterious meaning best explicable on the basis of practical needs. The weak point of hard automation is that the system configuration and operations are fixed and cannot be changed without incurring considerable cost and downtime. Mainly it can be used in applications that call for fast and accurate operation in large batch production. Whenever a variety of products must be manufactured in small batches and consequently the work-cells of a production line should be quickly reconfigured to accommodate a change in products, hard automation becomes inefficient and fails due to economic reasons. In these cases, new, more flexible way of automation, so-called "Soft Automation," are expedient and suitable. The most important "ingredient" of soft automation is its adaptive ability for efficiently coping with changing, unexpected or previously unknown conditions, and working with a high degree of uncertainty and imprecision since in practice increasing precision can be very costly. This adaptation must be realized without or within limited human interference: this is one essential component of machine intelligence. Another important factor is that engineering practice often must deal with complex systems of multiple variable and multiple parameter models almost always with strong nonlinear coupling. Conventional analysis-based approaches for describing and predicting the behavior of such systems in many cases are doomed to failure from the outset, even in the phase of the construction of a more or less appropriate mathematical model. These approaches normally are too categorical in the sense that in the name of "modeling accuracy," they try to describe all structural details of the real physical system to be modeled. This significantly increases the intricacy of the model and may result in huge computational burden without considerably improving precision. The best paradigm exemplifying this situation may be the classic perturbation theory: the less significant the achievable correction is, the more work must be invested for obtaining it. Another important component of machine intelligence is a kind of "structural uniformity" giving room and possibility to model arbitrary particular details a priori not specified and unknown. This idea is similar to that of the ready-to-wear industry, whose products can later be slightly modified in contrast to the custom-tailors' made-to-measure creations aiming at maximum accuracy from the beginning. Machines carry out these later corrections automatically. This "learning ability" is another key element of machine intelligence. To realize the above philosophy in a mathematically correct way, L. A. Zadeh separated Hard Computing from Soft Computing. This revelation immediately resulted in distinguishing between two essential complementary branches of machine intelligence: Hard Computing based Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing based Computational Intelligence. In the last decades, it became generally known that fuzzy logic, artificial neural networks, and probabilistic reasoning based Soft Computing is a fruitful orientation in designing intelligent systems. Moreover, it became generally accepted that soft computing rather than hard computing should be viewed as the foundation of real machine intelligence via exploiting the tolerance for imprecision, uncertainty and partial truth to achieve tractability, robustness, low solution cost and better rapport with reality. Further research in the past decade confirmed the view that typical components of present soft computing such as fuzzy logic, neurocomputing, evolutionary computation and probabilistic reasoning are complementary and best results can be obtained by their combined application. These complementary branches of Machine Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence and Computational Intelligence, serve as the basis of Intelligent Engineering Systems. The huge number of scientific results published in journals and conference proceedings worldwide substantiates this statement. Three years ago, a new series of conferences in this direction was initiated and launched with the support of several organizations including the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society and IEEE Hungary Section in technical cooperation with IEEE Robotics & Automation Society. The first event of the series hosted by Bdnki Dondt Polytechnic, Budapest, Hungary, was called "19997 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Engineering Systems " (INES'97). The Technical University of Vienna, Austria hosted the next event of the series in 1998, followed by INES'99 held by the Technical University of Kosice, Slovakia. The present special issue consists of the extended and revised version of the most interesting papers selected out of the presentations of this conference. The papers exemplify recent development trends of intelligent engineering systems. The first paper pertains to the wider class of neural network applications. It is an interesting report of applying a special Adaptive Resonance Theory network for identifying objects in multispectral images. It is called "Extended Gaussian ARTMAP". The authors conclude that this network is especially advantageous for classification of large, low dimensional data sets. The second paper's subject belongs to the realm of fuzzy systems. It reports successful application of fundamental similarity relations in diagnostic systems. As an example failure detection of rolling-mill transmission is considered. The next paper represents the AI-branch of machine intelligence. The paper is a report on an EU-funded project focusing on the storage of knowledge in a corporate organizational memory used for storing and retrieving knowledge chunks for it. The flexible structure of the system makes it possible to adopt it to different SMEs via using company-specific conceptual terms rather than traditional keywords. The fourth selected paper's contribution is to the field of knowledge discovery. For this purpose in the first step, cluster analysis is done. The method is found to be helpful whenever little or no information on the characteristics of a given data set is available. The next paper approaches scheduling problems by the application of the multiagent system. It is concluded that due to the great number of interactions between components, MAS seems to be well suited for manufacturing scheduling problems. The sixth selected paper's topic is emerging intelligent technologies in computer-aided engineering. It discusses key issues of CAD/CAM technology of our days. The conclusion is that further development of CAD/CAM methods probably will serve companies on the competitive edge. The seventh paper of the selection is a report on seeking a special tradeoff between classical analytical modeling and traditional soft computing. It nonconventionally integrates uniform structures obtained from Lagrangian Classical Mechanics with other simple elements of machine intelligence such as saturated sigmoid transition functions borrowed from neural nets, and fuzzy rules with classical PID/ST, and a simplified version of regression analysis. It is concluded that these different components can successfully cooperate in adaptive robot control. The last paper focuses on the complexity problem of fuzzy and neural network approaches. A fuzzy rule base, be it generated from expert operators or by some learning or identification schemes, may contain redundant, weakly contributing, or outright inconsistent components. Moreover, in pursuit of good approximation, one may be tempted to overly assign the number of antecedent sets, thereby resulting in large fuzzy rule bases and much problems in computation time and storage space. Engineers using neural networks have to face the same complexity problem with the number of neurons and layers. A fuzzy rule base and neural network design, hence, have two important objectives. One is to achieve a good approximation. The other is to reduce the complexity. The main difficulty is that these two objectives are contradictory. A formal approach to extracting the more pertinent elements of a given rule set or neurons is, hence, highly desirable. The last paper is an attempt in this direction. References 1)C. W. De Silva. Automation Intelligence. Engineering Application of Artificial Intelligence. Vol. 7. No. 5. 471-477 (1994). 2)L. A. Zadeh. Fuzzy Logic, Neural Networks and Soft Computing. NATO Advanced Studies Institute on Soft Computing and Its Application. Antalya, Turkey. (1996). 3)L. A. Zadeh. Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing. IEEE Industrial Electronics Society Newsletter. 41, (3), 8-10 (1994).