This paper aims at assessing the importance of sorption processes in space applications and the necessity of intelligent control systems for sorption processes. Thermal control and life support systems use extensively sorption processes, taking advantage of their intrinsic stability, their lack of vibrations and their regenerability. ESA's Darwin and Herschel missions' use of sorption cryocoolers is presented. Several life support subsystems employed on ISS are reviewed. A ground based adsorption chiller developed at Shanghai Jiao Tong University is described along with its nonlinear mathematical model. Based on this, a control system that will provide intelligent switching between the dierent operation phases of the chiller is designed. A Java software model of the chiller is used as an internal state estimator and as a source of information for a fuzzy inference module.