Fuzzy Rule Based Systems as Tools towards Solving the “Key Problem of Engineering”

Abstract

Key problem of engineering? Is there anything that is called so? In order to explain what is meant by this, let me start with some references to teaching Digital Design for B.Sc. Electrical/Electronics Engineering students in the first grade. The key part of the standard curriculum of this subject is a series of design algorithms for combinational and sequential circuits, even though it is obvious nowadays that the algorithmic design of LSI digital circuitry is a mathematically intractable problem that always leads to NP-hardness, and thus to insolvability in the classic sense. Learning the well established design approaches that have served well for SSI circuits in the early times of Digital Design nevertheless teaches a way of looking at the problems in a way that helps with finding reasonably good, or almost optimal solutions that can be very well used in the engineering practice and that might be applied in commercially feasible products, even in the case of more complex problems, up to the MSI level; while at the same time it teaches the students to think engineering optimization and design.