Guest editorial special issue on fusion of soft computing and hard computing in industrial applications

I T IS A true honor and a great pleasure for us to be able to present a Special Issue on Fusion of Soft Computing and Hard Computing in Industrial Applications in the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ONSYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS—PART C: APPLICATIONS ANDREVIEWS. The roots of this Special Issue can be traced back to the SMC-98 conference that was held in La Jolla, CA. One of the highlights of that conference was the panel discussion on “New Frontiers in Information/Intelligent Systems.” Dr. Lotfi A. Zadeh was the moderator of the panel, and the panelists were all world-class scholars in the field of soft computing (SC). While the discussion was certainly stimulating and provided inspiring visions, something was missing—the dominating and continuing role of conventional hard computing (HC) in developing successful products was not recognized at all—and that made us thinking of possible technical activities on the fusionof these two principal methodologies. In this 21st century, the engineering problems are becoming increasingly demanding. Thus, a constructive fusion of all possible methodologies is needed in developing innovative and competitive solutions. The primary goal of the fusion or symbiosis of SC and HC is to create computationally efficient, highly predictable, robust, and intelligent systems. This Special Issue contains a representative collection of application papers, where the methodological fusion aspect is in a major role. A kind of “sister product” of this special issue was the recent panel discussion on the same topic, which took place in the SMCia/01 workshop. Dr. David B. Fogel moderated the American–European–Asian panel in Blacksburg, VA. One of the conclusions of the panel was that the fusion of soft computing and hard computing is certainly needed—and is already widely used—in developing intelligent systems and industrial products. Also, soft computing is like mathematics or computer programming without immediate connections to specific applications; this sets new requirements for the engineering curricula. Our Special Issue contains nine papers authored by recognized international scholars. The papers were selected by a strict peer review from those 23 manuscripts that were received for consideration from ten countries. These papers show that the fusion of soft computing and hard computing can really be advantageous when developing intelligent systems for various applications. Unfortunately, due to space limitations, we had to leave out a few high-quality contributions.