Developing commercial applications of intelligent control

Intelligent control techniques that emulate characteristics of biological systems offer opportunities for creating control products with new capabilities. In today's competitive economic environment, these control techniques can provide products with the all-important competitive edge that companies seek. However, while numerous applications of intelligent control have been described in literature, few get past the simulation stage to become laboratory prototypes, and only a handful make their way into products. The ability of research work to impact products hinges not so much on finding the best solution to a problem but on finding the right problem and then solving it in a marketable way. The author offers some comments on how to find the "right" problem for intelligent control and what constitutes a marketable solution. Examples from fuzzy logic and neural network based control are used to illustrate the principles.