This book is concerned with Artificial Intelligence (AI) concepts and techniques as applied to industrial decision making, control and automation problems. The field of AI has been expanded enormously during the last years due to that solid theoretical and application results have accumulated. During the first stage of AI development most workers in the field were content with illustrations showing ideas at work on simple problems. Later, as the field matured, emphasis was turned to demonstrations that showed the capability of AI techniques to handle problems of practical value. Now, we arrived at the stage where researchers and practitioners are actually building AI systems that face real-world and industrial problems. This volume provides a set of twenty four well-selected contributions that deal with the application of AI to such real-life and industrial problems. These contributions are grouped and presented in five parts as follows: Part 1: General Issues Part 2: Intelligent Systems Part 3: Neural Networks in Modelling, Control and Scheduling Part 4: System Diagnostics Part 5: Industrial Robotic, Manufacturing and Organizational Systems Part 1 involves four chapters providing background material and dealing with general issues such as the conceptual integration of qualitative and quantitative models, the treatment of timing problems at system integration, and the investigation of correct reasoning in interactive man-robot systems.
