Developing commercial applications of intelligent control

Intelligent control techniques that emulate characteristics of biological systems offer opportunities for creating control products with new capabilities. In today´s competitive economic environment, these control techniques can provide products with the all-important competitive edge that companies seek. However, while numerous applications of intelligent control have been described in literature, few get past the simulation stage to become laboratory prototypes, and only a handful make their way into products. The ability of research work to impact products hinges not so much on finding the best solution to a problem but on finding the right problem and then solving it in a marketable way. The author offers some comments on how to find the “right” problem for intelligent control and what constitutes a marketable solution. Examples from fuzzy logic and neural network based control are used to illustrate the principles