Enhancing Transparent Fuzzy Controllers through temporal concepts: An application to computer games

In the last years, FML (Fuzzy Markup Language) is emerging as one of the most efficient and useful language to define a fuzzy control thanks to its capability of modeling Fuzzy Logic Controllers in a human-readable and hardware independent way, i.e the so-called Transparent Fuzzy Controllers (TFCs). However, although a FML fuzzy control is suitable to be employed in a wide range of applications, a Transparent Fuzzy Controller has a remarkable drawback: it lacks of the temporal concept. Time is crucial component in many systems above all if characterized from a discontinuous nonlinear behaviour as Variable-Structure Fuzzy systems, i.e., systems that change their configuration (knowledge base) or their behaviour (rule base) over time. To overcome TFCs temporal drawback, this paper combines FML fuzzy control together with a theory from formal languages: timed automata. The proposed synergic approach, called Timed Automata based Fuzzy Control, achieves a twofold advantage by representing a system in qualitative and hardware independent way and introducing a novel switching control concept able to maximize system's performances as will be shown by means of an application in video games context. © 2010 IEEE.