Advanced fuzzy logic technologies in industrial applications. (Q853484)

This volume provides a systematic review of recent fuzzy-logic control applications. The opening group of chapters 1 to 5 examines a number of fundamental issues in constructing and applying fuzzy-logic controllers. The basic constructs of fuzzy-logic namely fuzzy sets, fuzzy rulers and the defuzzification procedure are outlined in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 follows this basic material with a look at how fuzzy-logic controllers are implemented. A most interesting distinction between a static fuzzy-logic controller design and a dynamic (or adaptive) fuzzy-logic controller design is made in these chapters. This is one design route to enhancing the performance of fuzzy-logic controllers. Another route to performance enhancement is to extend the internal architecture of the fuzzy-logic controller by using ``fine'' and ``coarse'' lookup tables and this modification is covered in Chapter 2. Also of considerable interest to the industrial engineer will be the material in Chapter 3 relating to the implementation of software and hardware fuzzy-logic controller solutions. Methods to ease the tuning of fuzzy-logic controllers are presented in Chapters 4 and 5. A particular strength of this new volume in the ``Advances in Industrial Control'' series is the set of reports from a wide range of application studies, some 16 contributions in total, and these are found in Chapters 6 to 21. The subject areas are as follows: Manufacturing and Business Processes (Laser tracking system (Chapter 6), Data mining (Chapter 17), Manufacturing robot calibration (Chapter 20), Plastic injection moulding (Chapter 21)), Image Processing (Visual image processing (Chapter 7), Medical image processing (Chapter 8)). Vehicle control systems (Aspects of automobile control (Chapters 9, 10 and 11), Mobile root vehicles (Chapter 12), Unmanned aerial vehicle control (Chapter 15 and 16)), Power system control, Power distribution (Chapter 18), Power generation (Chapter 19)). This is quite a wide range of industrial areas and includes some non-control applications; for example, image processing and the survey chapter on fuzzy-logic applied to data-mining (Chapter 17). Of the 16 application chapters, one is a survey chapter, eight demonstrate practical results using computer-simulated models and seven involve results from hardware prototypes, hardware experimental laboratory-scale rigs and some field trials. Consequently, the volume has a healthy proportion of chapters with results from practical implementations of fuzzy-logic control. This volume will be of considerable interest to all those involved in the development and application of the fuzzy-logic controller field. Industrial engineers and academic researchers should find the volume a useful indicator of the maturity of the fuzzy-logic controller paradigm and a valuable resource for exploring the potential of these controllers for industrial applications.