The Role of Fuzzy Logic in Modeling, Identification and Control
The Role of Fuzzy Logic in Modeling, Identification and Control
LOTFI A. ZADEHt
In the nearly four decades which have passed since the launching of the Sputnik,
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great progress has been achieved in our understanding of how to model, identify and
control complex systems. However, to be able to design systems having high MIQ
(Machine Intelligence Quotient), a profound change in the orientation of control
theory may be required. More specifically, what may be needed is the employment
of soft computing—rather than hard computing—in systems analysis and design.
Soft computing-unlike hard computing—is tolerant of imprecision, uncertainty
and partial truth.
At this juncture, the principal constituents of soft computing are fuzzy logic,
neurocomputing and probabilistic reasoning. In this paper, the focus is on the role
of fuzzy logic. The basic ideas underlying fuzzy logic and its applications to
modeling, identification and control are described and illustrated by examples. The
role model for fuzzy logic is the human mind.
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better understanding of how abstract systems behave and how they could be designed
to perform in a specified way.
As a mathematically oriented system theorist, I had been conditioned to believe
that the analytical tools based on set theory and two-valued logic were all that was
needed to build a framework for a precise, rigorous and effective body of concepts and
techniques for the analysis of almost any kind of man-made or natural system,
including control systems. Then, in 1961-1963, in the course of writing a book on
system theory with C. A. Desoer, I began to feel that highly complex systems—typified
by economic and biological systems cannot be dealt with effectively by the use of
conventional approaches. My feeling derived, in the main, from a realization that
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was alluded to earlier, the impetus for transition from a crisp theory to a fuzzy one
derives from the fact that both the generality of a theory and its applicability to real
world problems arc substantially enhanced by replacing the concept of a set with that of
a fuzzy set.
Today, the growing tendency is to use the term fuzzy logic (FL) in its broad sense. In
part this reflects the fact that fuzzy logic sounds more euphonious than fuzzy set theory.
A concept which plays a cenfral role in the applications of fuzzy logic is that of a
linguistic variable (Zadeh 1973, 1975). A linguistic variable, as its name suggests, is a
variable whose values are words rather than numbers. For example, age is a linguistic
variable if its values are: young, old, not very old, etc. Each linguistic value is interpreted
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as a label of a fuzzy set in its universe of discourse and each such set, e.g., old, is defined
by its membership function, nol<i(u), which associates with each numerical value, u, of
age the degree to which n fits one's subjective, context-dependent perception of the
meaning of old. The grade of membership is assumed to take values in the interval
[0,1].
In current practice, in most applications to control, the membership functions of
linguistic values are assumed to be trapezoidal or triangular in shape (Fig. 1). The
number of linguistic values is usually in the range of three to seven, and the values are
labeled positive small (PS), negative large (NL), zero (Z), etc.
There is a basic aspect of the concept of a linguistic variable which is at the heart of
its utility. Specifically, consider a linguistic variable such as age whose linguistic values
are young, middle-aged, and old, with young defined by a membership function such as
shown in Fig. 2.
Clearly, a numerical value such as 25 is simpler than the function young. But young
represents a choice of one out of three possible values whereas 25 is a choice of one out
of, say, 100 values. The point of this simple example is that the use of linguistic values
may be viewed as a form of data compression. It is suggestive to refer to this form of
data compression as fuzzy granulation or simply granulation.
NL NM NS .i Z PS PM PL
\ \ \ / / / /
0 X
LINGUISTIC FUZZY
VARIABLE GRANULATION
DATA
COMPRESSION
20 40 Age 25 Age
choice of one out of choice of one out of
3 labels 100 values
194 L. A. Zadeh
The same effect can be achieved, of course, by conventional quantization. But in the
case of quantization, the values are crisp intervals whereas in the case of granulation the
values are overlapping fuzzy intervals (Fig. 3), resulting in a gradual rather than abrupt
transition from one value to another.
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The graduality of transition mimics the way in which humans perceive linguistic
values. More importantly—as will be seen later—it provides a basis for interpolative
reasoning. Such reasoning plays a central role in learning from experience.
3. Fuzzy rules
In fuzzy logic, the concept of a linguistic variable serves as a point of departure for
the construction of a language, referred to as FDCL (Fuzzy Dependency and
Command Language), which provides a framework for the description of imprecise
dependencies and commands through the use of fuzzy if-then rules or simply fuzzy
rules. In what follows, we shall sketch some of the basic ideas underlying FDCL.
Like any language, FDCL is characterized by its syntax and semantics. The syntax
and semantics of FDCL define, respectively, the form of rules and their meaning.
Simple examples of the rules in FDCL are the following.
(a) if pressure is high then volume is small
(b) if pressure is high and temperature is low then volume is very small
(c) if pressure is high then lower temperature slightly
(d) if pressure is high then volume is small unless temperature is high
(e) if pressure is high then usually volume is small.
In these examples, pressure, volume and temperature are linguistic variables and
small, low and high are their linguistic values. All of the rules except (c) represent
dependencies, with (c) representing a command. All of the rules except (d) and (e) are
categorical. Rules (d) and (e) are qualified, with (d) qualified through an exception and
(e) through usuality. (e) exemplifies what is referred to as a dispositional rule. All of the
rules except for (b) involve a single variable in the antecedent. A real-world example of
rules used in Honda's fuzzy logic transmission is shown in Fig. 4.
Assuming that small, low, high, usually and whatever other linguistic values may be
involved are defined by their membership functions, as in Fig. 4, a question of semantics
is: What is the meaning of a rule? And, more generally: What is the meaning of a
collection of rules? We shall examine these questions very briefly in the context of basic
generic rules of the form
if A" is A then Y is B, (1)
where A and B are linguistic values of X and Y, respectively.
In fuzzy logic, the answers to these questions are not unique. In what has become a
standard interpretation, (1) is interpreted as a fuzzy (elastic) constraint on the variables
X and y. More specifically, with -* representing translation, we have
if X is A then Y is B^(X, Y) is A x B, (2)
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where nA and nB are the membership functions of A and B, respectively; U and V are the
universes of discourse of X and Y; and A is the operation of conjunction, which is
usually defined as min but, more generally, can be any t-norm (Zimmermann 1990).
More generally, if the dependence of y on X is characterized by a collection of n
rules of the form (1), that is:
MX is Ai then Vis Bh i = l , . . . , « , (3)
then the meaning of the collection in question is defined by
if X is Ai then Y is B;, i=l,...,n->(X,Y) is Al x B, +... + An x B„, (4)
where + denotes disjunction. Usually the disjunction is defined as max but, more
generally, could be any t-conorm. For convenience, the right-hand member of (4) can be
written as
(X, Y) is 1,-/1,. x B,,
If / is a crisp function of X, Y=f(X), the expression
f* = I.iAixBi (5)
constitutes the fuzzy graph o f / (Zadeh 1971, 1973/74a, 1974b/76). More generally, if
Y = / ( X , , . . . , X „ ) is defined via n fuzzy rules of the form
Y is B, i f * ! is A} and ... and Xt is A^ i = l , (6)
then the fuzzy graph, / * , is expressed as
f* = T.iBixAl x ... xAl i = 1,...,«.
As shown in Fig. 5, / * may be interpreted as a coarse relational approximation to / .
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196 L. A. Zadeh
r f = small x small *
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medium x large *
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large x small
granulation
X X
R fr—| - * H )
1-*-.
S "
An example of a fuzzy model is shown in Fig. 7. In this model, R and S are assumed
to be characterized by the fuzzy rules
Z is large if X is small and Y is medium
R- Z is small if X is medium and Y is not very small
| Y is small if Z is large
S< Y is medium if Z is not very large
198 L. A. Zadeh
More specifically, let X„ Y, and S, denote the fuzzy input, fuzzy output and fuzzy
state at time r, t = 0,1,2,..., of a finite-state fuzzy system S. Then, the state equations of
S may be expressed as
S, + s=f(S„XXt = 0, 1,2,
y,=<?(s„x,). (9)
a* = I 1 / f i x B ; x D , (11
As a simple illustration, assume that the linguistic values of X„ S, and Y, are S
(small), M (medium) and L (large), respectively, with the understanding that the
membership functions of S, M and L are not necessarily the same for Xr S, and Y,.
Expressed in tabular form, the state equation may have, as an example, the form shown
in Table 1.
In cases where the spaces of states, inputs and outputs are continua rather than
finite sets it may be convenient to represent St+l in incremental form, that is,
current input
sML 5 current output
MS L M
L L MS
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Given an initial state S, and a goal state SG in the state space of S find a policy
function n,
which would take S from the initial state at time t = 0 to a slate at time t = N which is
nearest to SG.
Problems of this type can be solved through the use of fuzzy dynamic programming
(Bellman and Zadch 1970). More specifically, assume that the error at time N is defined
as the distance, J, between SN and SG, i.e.,
CN(SN) = d(SN, SG).
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200 L. A. Zadeh
The deep structure of a rule is its surface structure together with the definitions of
linguistic values which appear in its antecedent and consequent. In the case of the rule
represented by (13), the deep structure is the rule itself together with a specification of
the membership functions of A and B.
The concepts of surface and deep structure provide a convenient point of departure
for the formulation of the identification problem in the context of fuzzy rule-based
systems.
The basic identification problem has two variants. In the first variant, the starting
point is the knowledge of the surface structure of a system, S, which is the object of
identification. The problem is to approximate to the deep structure of S based on given
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The second variant is considerably more difficult than the first. In this variant, the
problem is the same but the surface structure is not known initially. A seminal
contribution to the solution of this problem was made by Takagi and Sugeno (1985).
Today, there is a fairly extensive literature on the problem in question but a definitive
solution is not yet in hand. In what follows, we shall discuss very briefly the simpler (first
variant) of the identification problem.
As is typical of standard approaches to the identification problem, the point of
departure is the postulated structure of a fuzzy system modulo the parameters of
linguistic variables in the fuzzy if-then-rules.
Many of the approaches described in the literature are based on variants of the
Takagi-Sugeno-Kang (TSK) architecture, which is illustrated in Fig. 9. In this
architecture, the input X is assumed to have k components Xi,...,Xk and the
consequent of rule R' is assumed to be a linear combination of the constituents of X.
The output, V, is a convex combination of the consequents, with the weight, w,, being
the conjunction of the grades of membership of A 1 ,,..., Xk in the antecedents A\,...,A'k,
respectively. In a frequently employed variant of this architecture, A is replaced with *
(product) and the membership functions are assumed to be triangular or trapezoidal. In
xo—»—(..~o. *—oy
Y= I,P,>"
P,.= w,./ I,.w,
w,= A'j(X,) A ... /\Ak{Xk)
Figure 10. The Jang architecture. In the illustrated system, there are two inputs, x and y, and
three rules.
other variants, the membership functions are assumed to be gaussian. This assumption
leads to methods which are similar to the radial basis function approaches used in
neurocomputing (Warwick et al. 1992).
A basic idea underlying the approaches described in the literature is that a fuzzy
system based on the TSK architecture can be represented as a multilayer feedforward
network. In the Jang approach (Jang 1992), for example, the system is represented as
shown in Fig. 10. The circles with n and N represent multipliers and normalizers,
respectively.
Representing a fuzzy system as a multilayer structure lays the groundwork for the
application of neurocomputing techniques and, in particular, the backpropagation
algorithm (Hertz et al. 1991) to the determination of parameters of membership
functions. In a more basic way, the techniques in question are rooted in dynamic
programming (Werbos 1974) and, more particularly, in gradient programming, which
through chain differentiation leads to the backpropagation algorithm (Zadeh 1994).
More detailed expositions of these methods may be found in (Jang 1992, Lin and Lee
1991, Wang 1993 and Takagi 1991).
In addition to the use of techniques borrowed from neurocomputing, there are
many promising approaches based on reinforcement learning (Berenji 1993) and
genetic algorithms (Lee and Takagi 1994). Important progress had been made in our
understanding of the identification problem in the context of fuzzy systems, but many
difficult problems remain to be addressed.
6. Concluding remarks
In coming years, a significant paradigm shift in systems analysis and control is likely
to take place. The shift in question involves a move toward the replacement of crisp
foundations of modern control theory and systems analysis by a foundation based on
fuzzy logic and soft computing—a collection of computing methodologies which are
tolerant of imprecision, uncertainty and partial truth.
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202 L. A. Zadeh
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