Technical monitoring and diagnostics: indispensable element of intelligent manufacturing systems

The application of pattern recognition techniques, expert systems, artificial neural networks, fuzzy systems and nowadays hybrid artificial intelligence techniques in manu-facturing can be regarded as consecutive elements of a proc-ess started two decades ago. The paper outlines the most important steps of this process. Agent-based systems are highlighted as promising tools for managing complexity, changes and disturbances in production. Further integration of approaches is predicted