Automatica 41 (2005) 921 – 922
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Book review
K.M. Hangos, R. Lakner, M. Gerzson, Intelligent con-
trol systems: an introduction with examples, Kluwer
Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, ISBN 1-4020-0134-7,
Copyright 2001 (280pp.), US$110.
With this book, the authors take up the challenging task of
proposing a text-book on the relatively new and still evolv-
ing set of techniques known altogether under the name of
“Intelligent Control” (IC). According to the authors’ aims,
this textbook should provide the “fundamentals and general
know-how in designing, implementing and operating intelli-
gent control systems,” and, more specifically, it should give
the reader the necessary “expertise to become a knowledge
engineer of intelligent control systems”.
1. Book overview
The material in the book spans 280 pages, a good half
of which is devoted to the fundamental tools for knowledge
representation and reasoning. In this respect, Chapters 2 and
3 introduce knowledge bases and rules for forward and back-
ward reasoning, which are the key mechanisms providing
an expert system with its ability of “logical reasoning” on
the information stored in its knowledge base. Chapter 4 dis-
cusses techniques for verification and maintenance of the
knowledge base, while Chapter 5 gives some rudiments on
classical tools for knowledge representation and reasoning,
such as the Lisp and Prolog programming languages. Chap-
ter 6 summarizes the software architecture of a real-time
expert system, and Chapter 7 outlines some techniques for
qualitative simulation of dynamic systems, such as interval
calculus and qualitative differential equations.
The second half of the book is contained in three chap-
ters, which introduce Petri nets (Chapter 8), Fuzzy control
(Chapter 9), and an example of a real-time expert system
(Chapter 10). Two brief appendices conclude the book.
2. Reading impressions
The book is easy to read, with a descriptive more than
technical style, hence it seems suitable for an undergraduate
0005-1098/$ - see front matter 䉷 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.automatica.2004.12.002
level audience. However, one distinctive impression I had in
reading this book was that of a lack of an overall cohesive
force driving the developments in the various chapters. In
this respect, it is fair to say that the very nature of the subject
lends itself to such kind of presentations. Indeed, despite ef-
forts made by many researchers in order to unify and define
what “intelligent control” is (see for instance the report from
the IC Task Force, (Antsaklis, 1994)), it still seems true that,
in the current practice, IC can be defined empirically as a
set of many scattered fields and techniques that include arti-
ficial intelligence, expert systems, fault management, fuzzy
control, discrete event and hybrid systems, Markov decision
processes, adaptive systems, autonomous and cooperative
robots, among many others. It is evident that no single book
can address such a large and diverse ensemble of technical
fields in an unified way.
Despite the title, that is reminiscent of dynamic sys-
tems and control, in my opinion, the book puts the accent
more on the “static” side of the subject, rather than on the
“dynamic” one. By static, here I intend to refer to those
techniques that pertain to database management, logic
inference, reasoning and programming languages, while
dynamic are those related to time evolution, adaptation,
learning, stability, control, cooperation of mobile agents, and
the like. All these latter areas are not directly touched in the
book.
Entering in the merit of the book contents, the various
subjects are treated at an introductory level, limiting the
mathematical details to a minimum. However, suitable ref-
erences are provided to guide the reader to more advanced
developments. If some sort of comparison should be made
with existing textbooks on similar subjects, it would ap-
pear natural to compare the text under consideration with
the classical book by Russel and Norvig (2002), which has
been adopted in many universities as a standard text on
artificial intelligence. Such a comparison will not be fa-
vorable for the book under review. Besides the fact that
Russel and Norvig (2002) treat many of the same subjects
contained in the book under review, it does so in much
more detail and breadth, covering additional important topics
such as multi-agent planning, Bayesian inference, machine
learning, Markov decision processes, robotics and image
interpretation.
922 Book review / Automatica 41 (2005) 921 – 922
3. Conclusions
This book is a welcome addition to the introductory lit-
erature on the emerging field of intelligent control. It might
be suitable for an undergraduate level course on artificial in-
telligence and programming languages for knowledge-base
management. According to the reader’s opinion, however,
other textbooks exist in the literature that cover similar top-
ics in deeper detail and with a better overall perspective.
Among these, I would mention again (Russel & Norvig,
2002) for an introduction to AI methodologies, (Cassandras,
1993) for discrete event systems and Petri nets, (Passino &
Yurkovich, 1998) for Fuzzy control systems, and (Antsaklis
& Passino, 1993) for an overall introduction to the field of
intelligent control.
References
Antsaklis, P. J. (1994). Defining intelligent control. Report of the Task
Force on Intelligent Control, P. J. Antsaklis, Chair. IEEE Control
Systems Magazine, 4–5 & 58–66.
Antsaklis, P. J., & Passino, K. M. (Eds.), (1993). An introduction to
intelligent and autonomous control. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Publishers.
Cassandras, C. G. (1993). Discrete event systems: Modeling and perfor-
mance analysis. Homewood, IL: Irwin.
Passino, K. M., & Yurkovich, S. (1998). Fuzzy control. Reading, MA:
Addison Wesley Longman, (later published by Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall).
Russel, S., & Norvig, P. (2002). AI: A modern approach. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Giuseppe Calafiore
Dipartimento di Automatica e Informatica,
Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24
10129 Torino, Italy
E-mail address: giuseppe.calafiore@polito.it.
About the Reviewer
Giuseppe Calafiore received the Laurea degree in Electrical Engineering
from Politecnico di Torino, Italy in 1993, and the Doctorate degree in
Information and System Theory from Politecnico di Torino in 1997.
Since 1998, he is a faculty member in Dipartimento di Automatica e
Informatica, Politecnico di Torino. Dr. Calafiore held visiting positions
at the Information Systems Laboratory, Stanford University, in 1995, at
the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avanceés (ENSTA), Paris,
in 1998, and at the University of California at Berkeley, in 1999. In
2003, he worked as a research engineer in the Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science department of UC Berkeley.
His research interests are in the fields of convex optimization, randomized
algorithms, and control of uncertain systems. Dr. Calafiore serves as
an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and
Cybernetics. He is the author of over sixty technical papers and two books.