Intelligent Systems involve a large class of systems which posses
human-like capabilities such as learning, observation, perception,
interpretation, reasoning under uncertainty, planning in known and
unknown environments, decision making, and control action. The field of
intelligent systems is actually a new interdisciplinary field which is
the outcome of the interaction, cooperation and synergetic merging of
classical fields such as system theory, control theory, artificial
intelligence, information theory, operational research, soft computing,
communications, linguistic theory, and others. Integrated intelligent
decision and control systems involve three primary hierarchical levels,
namely organization, coordination and execution levels. As we proceed
from the be performed organization to the execution level, the precision
about the jobs to increases and accordingly the intelligence required
for these jobs decreases. This is in compliance with the principle of
increasing precision with decreasing intelligence (IPOI) known from the
management field and theoretically established by Saridis using
information theory concepts. This book is concerned with intelligent
systems and techniques and gives emphasis on the computational and
processing issues. Control issues are not included here. The
contributions of the book are presented in four parts as follows.