Soft computing in industrial innovation: case study on home appliance technology

Soft computing (SC) is an evolving collection of methodologies, which aims to exploit tolerance for imprecision, uncertainty, and partial truth to achieve robustness, tractability, and low total cost. It differs from conventional hard computing in that it is strongly based on intuition or subjectivity. Therefore, soft computing provides an attractive opportunity to represent the ambiguity in human thinking with real life uncertainty. Fuzzy logic (FL), neural networks (NN), and evolutionary computation (EC) are the core methodologies of soft computing. However, FL, NN, and EC should not be viewed as competing with each other, but synergistic and complementary instead. In this paper, we discuss the role of soft computing in developing innovative features for home appliances. Such development work is particularly active in Japan and South Korea. In those Asian countries even ordinary consumers do appreciate the capabilities of SC in developing user-friendly products with high machine IQ. Although home appliance technology is not a popular academic research area, it is an important application area for soft computing methods