Book Description

This Proceedings contains the papers presented at the 9th IFAC AIRTC'2000 Symposium on Artificial Intelligence in Real-Time Control 2000, held at Budapest Polytechnic, Hungary, on 2 - 4 October. AIRTC'2000 builds on the excellent reputation of previous meetings in the series for providing top-quality papers in this important research field. A positive development illustrated by this Proceedings is a new trend towards pragmatism in the research field. Examples of this trend are: an increase in the number of actual industrial applications; support for more widespread use of new sophisticated technologies (e.g. materials design); further intertwining of artificial intelligence and control theory methods that reduces the reliance on blind faith, still too often associated with AI methods. Many things have changed since the first AIRTC event in 1988. Two examples illustrate the change in the general attitude of the IFAC family: in 1990, one of the major closing presentations of the IFAC World Congress warned the control community about the coming hordes of AI people. In 1999, one of the plenary papers at the IFAC World Congress pointed out that the AI based methods form a natural extension of control theory to the class of non-linear systems with incomplete information (at least as far as the optimisation is concerned). This contrast in attitudes shows how, during the past decade, many AI people have embraced control theory and many control people have learned the basics of AI. This Proceedings serves to continue this excellent dialogue, by providing many quality papers which link both fields.