Application of Artificial Intelligence to Improve Skills in Electropneumatic Control Systems to Engineering Students

Industrial applications are increasingly developed as hybrid systems based on pneumatics, oil-hydraulics, electricity, or electronics. One of the tasks required in its creation is to calculate the optimized set of logical equations to reduce implementation costs. However, traditional methods do not allow the use of more than 5 or 6 variables. Digital control systems have made it possible to neglect the simplification aspect, but it must be considered that situations exist in which the use of electrical and/or electronic circuits is not permitted for reasons of safety or technology redundancy. The present work extends the concept of the Karnaugh map (K-map), applied to a sequence of logical operations of a complex electro-pneumatic system (i.e., more than 5 input variables – 6 or more pneumatic cylinders), to allow the logical state transition matrix of system control to be built directly. In this article we present an Artificial Intelligence application, developed in PROLOG, which performs computational symbolic manipulation of sequential electropneumatic circuits using K-map. These methodologies must respond to the new control technologies in a philosophy of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and “Industry 4.0” (I4.0), considering the challenges and limits associated with programming methods based on embedded systems or programmable logic controllers. Therefore, symbolic manipulation will guarantee not only the obtaining of logical equations, as well as all possible combinations of logical equations, but also their implementation based in IEC 61131. This system is also intended to allow remote access to external users and improve the quality of learning in these areas of industrial automation.