Fuzzy control: From heuristic rules to optimization on thousands of decision variables

Abstract

One of the earliest applications of fuzzy logic was fuzzy control. Indeed, early Lofti Zadeh's background was in systems and control engineering and, hence, his way of thinking was close to that of control engineers, the group of people I belong to. My personal trajectory in the last 20 years follows a path of formalisation akin to that of fuzzy control in the a bit more than 40 years that have elapsed since its original inception. Indeed, fuzzy control started as a way to incorporate heuristic expert knowledge in the control loop but nowadays it has evolved into a formal control discipline with optimization, robustness, stability proofs, etc. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.