Acknowledgments
I should first like to acknowledge the debt I owe to those whose pioneering work on the design and application of fuzzy control systems first sparked my interest in the monitoring and control of information-poor systems over 30 years ago.
The important contribution made by the many graduate students I have supervised over the last 20 years, who worked tirelessly on debugging the software and performing the experiments needed to assess the performance of techniques we developed together, is also gratefully acknowledged. My particular thanks go to Woei Wan Tan, Darius Ngo, Richard Thompson, Amanda Lee, Yue Wu, Jean-Camille de Barros, Huiling Tan, Bilal Kadri and Andrew Wright, whose research formed the basis of many of the ideas and techniques described in this book.
I should also like to pay tribute to Nicky, my original project editor, whose totally unexpected and tragic, premature death came as a terrible shock to all of us who worked with her.
Finally, a special thank you goes to my wife, my three daughters and my grandchildren both for allowing me the time and personal space I needed to complete the book and for bringing so much happiness into my life.
