An enhanced visual environment for designing, testing and developing FML-based fuzzy systems

Fuzzy Logic Controllers (FLCs) represent one of the most successful methodologies exploiting fuzzy logic to model complex systems characterized by ambiguity and vagueness. Fuzzy logic applied in the control theory allows to reduce the complexity of the FLC design process thanks to the linguistic representation of the systems' behaviour. However, in spite of their benefit, the implementation of FLCs is affected by a significant drawback, i.e., the strong dependence on hardware architecture. In order to overcome this limitation, an XML-based language, named Fuzzy Markup Language (FML), has been introduced. FML allows designers to model FLCs in a human-readable and hardware-independent way. FML benefits arise from the exploitation of an alternative representation of a FLC based on labeled trees, data structure derived from XML-based document representation. However, this new graphical FLC representation can be exploited to implement an enhanced visual environment which allows designers to easily model a FLC through visual steps. This chapter is devoted, firstly, to present the new graphical representation of a FLC based on labeled trees, and, secondly, to describe the implemented framework, named Visual FML Tool, capable of exploiting labeled tree benefits by achieving a twofold purpose: the simplification of the FLC design through simple visual steps and a hardware-independent FLC modeling thanks to the direct mapping of the FLC labeled tree in a FML program. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.