Formal goal generation for intelligent control systems

Abstract

In the engineering context of control or measurement systems, there is a growing need to incorporate more and more intelligence towards sensing/actuating components. These components achieve some global service related with an intended goal through a set of elementary services intended to achieve atomic goals. There are many possible choices and non-trivial relations between services. As a consequence, both novices and specialists need assistance to prune the search space of possible services and their relations. To provide a sound knowledge representation for functional reasoning, we propose a method eliciting a goal hierarchy in Intelligent Control Systems. To refine the concept of goal with sub-concepts, we investigate a formalization which relies on a multi-level structure. The method is centered both on a mereological approach to express both physical environment and goal concepts, and on Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) to model concept aggregation/decomposition. The interplay between mereology and FCA is discussed. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.