The idea about this book has evolved during the process of its
preparation as some of the results have been achieved in parallel with
its writing. One reason for this is that in this area of research
results are very quickly updated. Another is, possibly, that a strong,
unchallenged theoretical basis in this field still does not fully exist.
From other hand, the rate of innovation, competition and demand from
different branches of industry (from biotech industry to civil and
building engineering, from market forecasting to civil aviation, from
robotics to emerging e-commerce) is increasingly pressing for more
customised solutions based on learning consumers behaviour. A highly
interdisciplinary and rapidly innovating field is forming which focus is
the design of intelligent, self-adapting systems and machines. It is on
the crossroads of control theory, artificial and computational
intelligence, different engineering disciplines borrowing heavily from
the biology and life sciences. It is often called intelligent control,
soft computing or intelligent technology. Some other branches have
appeared recently like intelligent agents (which migrated from robotics
to different engineering fields), data fusion, knowledge extraction
etc., which are inherently related to this field. The core is the
attempts to enhance the abilities of the classical control theory in
order to have more adequate, flexible, and adaptive models and control
algorithms.
