A computational intelligence perspective on process monitoring and optimization

In the design of autonomous computer-based systems, we often face the embarrassing situation of having to specify, to the system, how it should carry out certain tasks, which involve computations known to be intractable or are suspected of being so. To circumvent such impasses, we resort to complexity-reducing strategies and tactics which trade some loss of accuracy for significant reductions in complexity. The term computational intelligence refers to such complexity reduction methods and to the research aimed at identifying such methods. In this paper we describe briefly some of our own work in this area and then develop a computational intelligence view of the task of process monitoring and optimization, as performed by autonomous systems. Some important current fields of discovery in computational intelligence include neural-net computing, evolutionary programming, fuzzy sets, associative memory and so on.