Cognitive Automation—Survey of Novel Artificial General Intelligence Methods for the Automation of Human Technical Environments

Automation, the utilization of control and information technologies for reducing the need for human intervention in the production process is about to meet Cognition-the science concerned with human thinking-and related sciences. More and more processes require analysis and insights that allow controlling them beyond the mere execution of rules and beyond prefitted controllers in order to automatically keep them within the desired conditions. Automatic and flexible decision making based on challenging conditions such as increasing amounts of information, lacking prior knowledge of data, incomplete, missing or contradicting data, becomes the key challenges for future automation technologies.