Hybrid intelligent systems for pneumatic sequential circuit design: Hybridizing genetic algorithms and rule-based logic programming

Logic synthesis is an important step in process design and automation. Electronics witnessed tremendous improvements in the reliability of automatically designed circuits with reduced lead time with the application of logic synthesis in circuit design. Industrial process automation systems using hydraulic and pneumatic circuits need logic synthesis to obtain proper sequence of process operations. Deterministic approaches have been used for decades to aid in logic synthesis. These approaches are limited by the volume of data that could be handled because of phenomena like exponential explosion. This paper presents an approach based on hybrid intelligence for logic synthesis for industrial automation systems using pneumatic sequential circuits. The proposed logic synthesis system starts with the sequence of operations as its input and generates the truth table required for the pneumatic circuit for performing the given set of operations. The proposed system hybridizes rule based logic programming and genetic algorithms and is capable of solving considerably difficult problems through an evolutionary strategy. Case studies are presented to demonstrate the capability of the proposed approach for logic design for pneumatics based industrial automation.