In conventional mathematical programming, coefficients of problems are usually determined by the experts as crisp values in terms of classical mathematical reasoning. But in reality, in an imprecise and uncertain environment, it will be utmost unrealistic to assume that the knowledge and representation of an expert can come in a precise way. The wider objective of the book is to study different real decision situations where problems are defined in inexact environment. Inexactness are mainly generated in two ways – (1) due to imprecise perception and knowledge of the human expert followed by vague representation of knowledge as a DM; (2) due to huge-ness and complexity of relations and data structure in the definition of the problem situation. We use interval numbers to specify inexact or imprecise or uncertain data. Consequently, the study of a decision problem requires answering the following initial questions: How should we compare and define preference ordering between two intervals?, interpret and deal inequality relations involving interval coefficients?, interpret and make way towards the goal of the decision problem? The present research work consists of two closely related fields: approaches towards defining a generalized preference ordering scheme for interval attributes and approaches to deal with some issues having application potential in many areas of decision making.

In conventional mathematical programming, coefficients of problems are usually determined by the experts as crisp values in terms of classical mathematical reasoning. But in reality, in an imprecise and uncertain environment, it will be utmost unrealistic to assume that the knowledge and representation of an expert can come in a precise way. The wider objective of the book is to study different real decision situations where problems are defined in inexact environment. Inexactness are mainly generated in two ways – (1) due to imprecise perception and knowledge of the human expert followed by vague representation of knowledge as a DM; (2) due to huge-ness and complexity of relations and data structure in the definition of the problem situation. We use interval numbers to specify inexact or imprecise or uncertain data. Consequently, the study of a decision problem requires answering the following initial questions: How should we compare and define preference ordering between two intervals?, interpret and deal inequality relations involving interval coefficients?, interpret and make way towards the goal of the decision problem? The present research work consists of two closely related fields: approaches towards defining a generalized preference ordering scheme for interval attributes and approaches to deal with some issues having application potential in many areas of decision making.

This important edited volume is the first such book ever published on fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs). Professor Michael Glykas has done an exceptional job in bringing together and editing its seventeen chapters. The volume appears nearly a quarter century after my original article “Fuzzy Cognitive Maps” appeared in the International Journal of Man-Machine Studies in 1986. The volume accordingly reflects many years of research effort in the development of FCM theory and applications—and portends many more decades of FCM research and applications to come. FCMs are fuzzy feedback models of causality. They combine aspects of fuzzy logic, neural networks, semantic networks, expert systems, and nonlinear dynamical systems. That rich structure endows FCMs with their own complexity and lets them apply to a wide range of problems in engineering and in the soft and hard sciences. Their partial edge connections allow a user to directly represent causality as a matter of degree and to learn new edge strengths from training data. Their directed graph structure allows forward or what-if inferencing. FCM cycles or feedback paths allow for complex nonlinear dynamics. Control of FCM nonlinear dynamics can in many cases let the user encode and decode concept patterns as fixed-point attractors or limit cycles or perhaps as more exotic dynamical equilibria. These global equilibrium patterns are often “hidden” in the nonlinear dynamics. The user will not likely see these global patterns by simply inspecting the local causal edges or nodes of large FCMs.

This book studies optimized models with fuzzy quantities. It can be used by undergraduates in higher education, master graduates and doctor graduates. It also serves as a reference for researchers, particularly for those in the field of soft science.

The ‘Fuzzy Logic’ research group of the Microelectronics Institute of Seville is composed of researchers who have been doing research on fuzzy logic since the beginning of the 1990s. Mainly, this research has been focused on the microel- tronic design of fuzzy logic-based systems using implementation techniques which range from ASICs to FPGAs and DSPs. Another active line was the development of a CAD environment, named Xfuzzy, to ease such design. Several versions of Xfuzzy have been and are being currently developed by the group. The addressed applications had basically belonged to the control ?eld domain. In this sense, s- eral problems without a linear control solution had been studied thoroughly. Some examples are the navigation control of an autonomous mobile robot and the level control of a dosage system. The research group tackles a new activity with the work developed in this book: the application of fuzzy logic to video and image processing. We addressed our interest to problems related to pixel interpolation, with the aim of adapting such interpolation to the local features of the images. Our hypothesis was that measures and decisions to solve image interpolation, which traditionally had been done in a crisp way, could better be done in a fuzzy way. Validation of this general hypothesis has been done speci?cally in the interpolation problem of video de-interlacing. - interlacing is one of the main tasks in video processing.

This monograph is the r st in Fuzzy Approximation Theory. It contains mostly the author s research work on fuzziness of the last ten years and relies a lot on [10]-[32] and it is a natural outgrowth of them. It belongs to the broader area of Fuzzy Mathematics. Chapters are self-contained and several advanced courses can be taught out of this book. We provide lots of applications but always within the framework of Fuzzy Mathematics. In each chapter is given background and motivations. A c- plete list of references is provided at the end. The topics covered are very diverse. In Chapter 1 we give an extensive basic background on Fuzziness and Fuzzy Real Analysis, as well a complete description of the book. In the following Chapters 2,3 we cover in deep Fuzzy Di?erentiation and Integ- tion Theory, e.g. we present Fuzzy Taylor Formulae. It follows Chapter 4 on Fuzzy Ostrowski Inequalities. Then in Chapters 5, 6 we present results on classical algebraic and trigonometric polynomial Fuzzy Approximation.

The book, titled “Linguistic Fuzzy-Logic Methods in Social Sciences,” is a first in its kind. Linguistic fuzzy logic theory deals with sets or categories whose boundaries are blurry or, in other words, “fuzzy,” and which are expressed in a formalism that uses “words” to compute, not numbers, termed in engineering as “soft computing.” This book presents an accessible introduction to this linguistic fuzzy logic methodology, focusing on its applicability to social sciences. Specifically, this is the first book to propose an approach based on linguistic fuzzy-logic and the method of computing with words to the analysis of decision making processes, strategic interactions, causality, and data analysis in social sciences. The project consists of systematic, theoretical and practical discussions and developments of these new methods as well as their applications to various substantive issues of interest to international relations scholars, political scientists, and social scientists in general.

This book provides comprehensive coverage of uncertain programming theory, including numerous modeling ideas, hybrid intelligent algorithms, and applications in system reliability design, vehicle routing problem, and machine scheduling problem.

This book covers in a great depth the fast growing topic of techniques, tools and applications of soft computing in XML data management. It is shown how XML data management (like model, query, integration) can be covered with a soft computing focus. This book aims to provide a single account of current studies in soft computing approaches to XML data management. The objective of the book is to provide the state of the art information to researchers, practitioners, and graduate students of the Web intelligence, and at the same time serving the information technology professional faced with non-traditional applications that make the application of conventional approaches difficult or impossible.

Biological systems are inherently stochastic and uncertain. Thus, research in bioinformatics, biomedical engineering and computational biology has to deal with a large amount of uncertainties. Fuzzy logic has shown to be a powerful tool in capturing different uncertainties in engineering systems. In recent years, fuzzy logic based modeling and analysis approaches are also becoming popular in analyzing biological data and modeling biological systems. Numerous research and application results have been reported that demonstrated the effectiveness of fuzzy logic in solving a wide range of biological problems found in bioinformatics, biomedical engineering, and computational biology. Contributed by leading experts world-wide, this edited book contains 16 chapters presenting representative research results on the application of fuzzy systems to genome sequence assembly, gene expression analysis, promoter analysis, cis-regulation logic analysis and synthesis, reconstruction of genetic and cellular networks, as well as biomedical problems, such as medical image processing, electrocardiogram data classification and anesthesia monitoring and control. This volume is a valuable reference for researchers, practitioners, as well as graduate students working in the field of bioinformatics, biomedical engineering and computational biology.