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........ published in NEWSLETTER # 51

INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS: SAFETY, RELIABILITY AND MAINTAINABILITY ISSUES
by Professor O. Kaynak, Bogazici University, Istanbul (Turkey)

There has been a growing interest among the scientific community in the architecture and the control of intelligent systems. A number of scientific meetings are organized every year to discuss the most recent developments. The issues that need to be examined are so numerous, however, that only a small amount of time can usually be allocated to the dependability aspects of intelligent systems. Identifying the need for a meeting specifically dedicated to this topic, a NATO Advanced Research Workshop was organized in Kusadasi, Turkey, during August 1992. The express purpose of the meeting was to debate where the issues of safety, reliability and maintainability place direct and tangible constraints on the development of intelligent systems This book is a collection of the papers presented during the workshop. The attendance at the workshop was mainly by invitation only, drawing people representing industry, government and the academic community.

The papers presented during the workshop are organized in six parts in the resulting volume (NATO ASI SERIES F114). In Part 1, the analysis and assessment issues related to intelligent control systems are addressed. In the second part, the dependability of intelligent systems is discussed where the world dependability encompasses all aspects of system safety, reliability, availability and security. Part 3 is concerned with the intelligent front ends. In the next part, learning systems is the subject matter. The last two parts are application oriented: In Part 5, the safety and reliability of robotic systems are discussed. The book concludes with part 6 where some examples of industrial applications of intelligent systems with particular emphasis on reliability are presented.

There has been an effort to balance the theory and the applications in the volume; some papers provide introductory and overview material as well as reviews of the state_of_the_art and others provide enough detail in specialized areas. With these characteristics, it should appeal to both the researchers and the practitioners in the field. Another volume published by Springer_Verlag in NATO ASI Series, volume F 120, `Reliability and Safety Assessment of Dynamic Process Systems' is suggested for further reading.
Reference books: F21, F114, F120

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