Qualitative control: qualitative design and verification of industrial controllers

Smart robots working as controllers (supervisors or operators) of industrial plants and processes are discussed. The preliminaries are introduced of a formalism called qualitative control, which can be used to reason about the behavior and synthesize the desired behavior of the system in a manner resembling the problem-solving behavior of human operators/supervisors. The qualitative flow graph is used to represent the structural description and qualitative reasoning method for deriving the potential behavior. Qualitative control begins with a desired behavior and is based on knowledge of the potential behaviors. Relativity analysis and its modified version introduced here allow inference of the direct input-output forms and qualitative speed comparison of the processes.<>