  A major aspect of human reasoning involves the use of approximations.
Particularly in situations where the decision-making process is under stringent
time constraints, decisions are based largely on approximate, qualitative
assessments of the situations. Our work is concerned with the application of
approximate reasoning to real-time control. Because of the stringent processing
speed requirements in such applications, hardware implementations of fuzzy
logic inferencing are being pursued. We describe a programming environment for
translating fuzzy control rules into hardware realizations. Two methods of
hardware realizations are possible. The First is based on a special purpose
chip for fuzzy inferencing. The second is based on a simple memory chip. The
ability to directly translate a set of decision rules into hardware
implementations is expected to make fuzzy control an increasingly practical
approach to the control of complex systems.
