Fuzzy markup language: A new solution for transparent intelligent agents

From an industrial and technological point of view, fuzzy control theory deals with the development of a particular system controller on a specific hardware by means of an open or legacy programming language that is useful to address, in a high-level fashion, the hardware constraints. Independently from the complexity of the addressed application problem, the development time may be very expensive if the designers want to exploit the possibility to collect different controllers in terms of an active, cooperative and heterogeneous virtual organization. In order to bridge this gap, we introduce the Fuzzy Markup Language (FML), a novel specific-purpose computer language that defines a detailed structure of fuzzy control independent from its legacy representation. This choice allows systems' designers to to express their ideas in fast and simple way and, as a consequence, speeds up the whole development process of a given complex system. © 2011 IEEE.