Problems in decision making and in other areas such as pattern recogni tion, control, structural engineering etc. involve numerous aspects of uncertainty. Additional vagueness is introduced as models become more complex but not necessarily more meaningful by the added details. During the last two decades one has become more and more aware of the fact that not all this uncertainty is of stochastic (random) cha racter and that, therefore, it can not be modelled appropriately by probability theory. This becomes the more obvious the more we want to represent formally human knowledge. As far as uncertain data are concerned, we have neither instru ments nor reasoning at our disposal as well defined and unquestionable as those used in the probability theory. This almost infallible do main is the result of a tremendous work by the whole scientific world. But when measures are dubious, bad or no longer possible and when we really have to make use of the richness of human reasoning in its variety, then the theories dealing with the treatment of uncertainty, some quite new and other ones older, provide the required complement, and fill in the gap left in the field of knowledge representation. Nowadays, various theories are widely used: fuzzy sets, belief function, the convenient associations between probability and fuzzines~ etc ••• We are more and more in need of a wide range of instruments and theories to build models that are more and more adapted to the most complex systems.

In the beginning of 1983, I came across A. Kaufmann's book "Introduction to the theory of fuzzy sets" (Academic Press, New York, 1975). This was my first acquaintance with the fuzzy set theory. Then I tried to introduce a new component (which determines the degree of non-membership) in the definition of these sets and to study the properties of the new objects so defined. I defined ordinary operations as "n", "U", "+" and "." over the new sets, but I had began to look more seriously at them since April 1983, when I defined operators analogous to the modal operators of "necessity" and "possibility". The late George Gargov (7 April 1947 - 9 November 1996) is the "god father" of the sets I introduced - in fact, he has invented the name "intu itionistic fuzzy", motivated by the fact that the law of the excluded middle does not hold for them. Presently, intuitionistic fuzzy sets are an object of intensive research by scholars and scientists from over ten countries. This book is the first attempt for a more comprehensive and complete report on the intuitionistic fuzzy set theory and its more relevant applications in a variety of diverse fields. In this sense, it has also a referential character.

Fuzzy Set Theory: Foundations and Applications serves as a simple introduction to basic elements of fuzzy set theory. The emphasis is on a conceptual rather than a theoretical presentation of the material. Fuzzy Set Theory also contains an overview of the corresponding elements of classical set theory - including basic ideas of classical relations - as well as an overview of classical logic. Because the inclusion of background material in these classical foundations provides a self-contained course of study, students from many different academic backgrounds will have access to this important new theory.

Fuzzy theory has become a subject that generates much interest among the courses for graduate students. However, it was not easy to find a suitable textbook to use in the introductory course and to recommend to the students who want to self-study. The main purpose of this book is just to meet that need. The author has given lectures on the fuzzy theory and its applications for ten years and continuously developed lecture notes on the subject. This book is a publication of the modification and summary of the lecture notes. The fundamental idea of the book is to provide basic and concrete concepts of the fuzzy theory and its applications, and thus the author focused on easy illustrations of the basic concepts. There are numerous examples and figures to help readers to understand and also added exercises at the end of each chapter. This book consists of two parts: a theory part and an application part. The first part (theory part) includes chapters from 1 to 8. Chapters 1 and 2 introduce basic concepts of fuzzy sets and operations, and Chapters 3 and 4 deal with the multi-dimensional fuzzy sets. Chapters 5 and 6 are extensions of the fuzzy theory to the number and function, and Chapters 7 and 8 are developments of fuzzy properties on the probability and logic theories.

This book presents a collection of recent research on topics related to Pythagorean fuzzy set, dealing with dynamic and complex decision-making problems. It discusses a wide range of theoretical and practical information to the latest research on Pythagorean fuzzy sets, allowing readers to gain an extensive understanding of both fundamentals and applications. It aims at solving various decision-making problems such as medical diagnosis, pattern recognition, construction problems, technology selection, and more, under the Pythagorean fuzzy environment, making it of much value to students, researchers, and professionals associated with the field.

The primary aim of the book is to provide a systematic development of the theory of metric spaces of normal, upper semicontinuous fuzzy convex fuzzy sets with compact support sets, mainly on the base space ?n. An additional aim is to sketch selected applications in which these metric space results and methods are essential for a thorough mathematical analysis.This book is distinctly mathematical in its orientation and style, in contrast with many of the other books now available on fuzzy sets, which, although all making use of mathematical formalism to some extent, are essentially motivated by and oriented towards more immediate applications and related practical issues. The reader is assumed to have some previous undergraduate level acquaintance with metric spaces and elementary functional analysis.

This book introduces fuzzy set theory to social science researchers. Fuzzy sets are categories with blurred boundaries. With classical sets, objects are either in the set or not, but objects can belong partially to more than one fuzzy set at a time. Many concepts in the social sciences have this characteristic, and fuzzy set theory provides methods for systematically dealing with them. A primary reason for not going beyond programmatic statements and rather unsophisticated uses of fuzzy set theory has been the lack of practical methods for combining fuzzy set concepts with statistical methods. This monograph takes that topic as its major focus, and provides explicit guides for researchers who would like to harness fuzzy set concepts while being able to make statistical inferences and test their models. Real examples and data-sets from several disciplines illustrate the techniques and applications, demonstrating how a combination of fuzzy sets and statistics enable researchers to analyze their data in new ways.

Since its inception 20 years ago the theory of fuzzy sets has advanced in a variety of ways and in many disciplines. Applications of this theory can be found in artificial intelligence, computer science, control engineering, decision theory, expert systems, logic, management science, operations research, pattern recognition, robotics and others. Theoretical advances, too, have been made in many directions, and a gap has arisen between advanced theoretical topics and applications, which often use the theory at a rather elementary level. The primary goal of this book is to close this gap - to provide a textbook for courses in fuzzy set theory and a book that can be used as an introduction. This revised book updates the research agenda, with the chapters of possibility theory, fuzzy logic and approximate reasoning, expert systems and control, decision making and fuzzy set models in operations research being restructured and rewritten. Exercises have been added to almost all chapters and a teacher's manual is available upon request.

This book aims to be a comprehensive and accurate survey of state-of-art research on intuitionistic fuzzy sets theory and could be considered a continuation and extension of the author ́s previous book on Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets, published by Springer in 1999 (Atanassov, Krassimir T., Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets, Studies in Fuzziness and soft computing, ISBN 978-3-7908-1228-2, 1999). Since the aforementioned book has appeared, the research activity of the author within the area of intuitionistic fuzzy sets has been expanding into many directions. The results of the author ́s most recent work covering the past 12 years as well as the newest general ideas and open problems in this field have been therefore collected in this new book.