I am sure this is a student project.

Steve has given you the hint.Pick it up from there.

Anyway I can tell you the way ( not very sophisticated though ) that another student solved this problem.

It was an AC motor Driving a DC generator for a MIG welding machine.The generator had an AC motor driven cooling fan.

What he did was this:

First start the cooling fan drive. On its shaft was coupled some spare encoder with quadrature pulse output. Using this output sense the direction.

Then use this information to energize the proper phase sequencing relays so that the main AC motor starts in the right direction ( and also correct the fan direction should it be wrong )

Not very complicated, but I thought it was kind of smart on the part of a student.

Raghu