The book explores the dual complexities of control processes: quantitative complexity from high-dimensional mathematical models and qualitative complexity from uncertain behaviors. It highlights the advancements in large-scale systems theory and fuzzy linguistic approaches that address these complexities separately. However, when combined, these challenges create non-trivial control problems. The emergence of "Distributed Intelligent Control Systems" aims to tackle these issues using modern technology and artificial intelligence, though much of the existing work remains empirical or conceptual.
The book presents an innovative fuzzy network concept, where nodes represent rule bases and their interactions enhance model feasibility and transparency. It explores modular rule bases to optimize accuracy and efficiency in fuzzy modeling of complex systems marked by nonlinearity and uncertainty. The systematic study includes formal models, operations on network nodes, and evaluations of fuzzy networks, supported by examples, case studies, and Matlab software implementations. This concept serves as a link between standard and hierarchical fuzzy systems, advancing the field significantly.
Doing research is a great adventure As any adventure sometimes it is hard You may feel alone and with no idea where to go But if you have courage and press onwards You will eventually stand where no one has stood And see the world as no one has seen it There can be no better feeling than this! Adaptation from ‘Introduction to Research’, Tom Addis (2004) The idea about this book has been on the author’s mind for almost a decade but it was only about a couple of years ago when the underlying research process was actually started. The reason for this delay has been the insufficient spare time for research being a lecturer in a ‘new’ UK university where the emphasis is mainly on teaching. And maybe this book would have never been written if the author had not been presented with the chance of developing new teaching modules in fuzzy logic that have given him food for thought in a research related context and have helped him combine efficiently his teaching and research activities. The title of this book may sound too specialised but it has a much wider meaning. Fuzzy systems are any systems for modelling, simulation, control, prediction, diagnosis, decision making, pattern recognition, image processing, etc. which use fuzzy logic. Although fuzzy logic is an advanced extension of binary logic, the latter is still used predominantly today.
