Bücher der Reihe Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing

In Part I, the impact of an integro-differential operator on parity logic engines (PLEs) as a tool for scientific modeling from scratch is presented. Part II outlines the fuzzy structural modeling approach for building new linear and nonlinear dynamical causal forecasting systems in terms of fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs). Part III introduces the new type of autogenetic algorithms (AGAs) to the field of evolutionary computing. Altogether, these PLEs, FCMs, and AGAs may serve as conceptual and computational power tools.

Some recent fuzzy database modeling advances for the non-traditional applications are introduced in this book. The focus is on database models for modeling complex information and uncertainty at the conceptual, logical, physical design levels and from integrity constraints defined on the fuzzy relations. The database models addressed here are; the conceptual data models, including the ExIFO and ExIFO2 data models, the logical database models, including the extended NF2 database model, fuzzy object-oriented database model, and the fuzzy deductive object-oriented database model. Integrity constraints are defined on the fuzzy relations are also addressed. A continuing reason for the limited adoption of fuzzy database systems has been performance. There have been few efforts at defining physical structures that accomodate fuzzy information. A new access structure and data organization for fuzzy information is introduced in this book.

Fuzzy logic is a way of thinking that is responsive to human zeal to unveil uncertainty and deal with social paradoxes emerging from it. In this book a number of articles illustrate various social applications to fuzzy logic. The engineering part of the book contains a number of papers, devoted to the description of fuzzy engineering design methodologies. In order to share the experience gained we select papers describing not the application result only but the way how this result has been obtained, that is explaining the design procedures. The potential readership of this book includes researchers and students, workers and engineers in both areas of social and engineering studies. It can be used as a handbook and textbook also. The book includes some examples of real fuzzy engineering.

This book provides a comprehensive, up-to-date account on recent applications of fuzzy sets and possibility theory in reliability and safety analysis. Various aspects of system's reliability, quality control, reliability and safety of man-machine systems fault analysis, risk assessment and analysis, structural, seismic, safety, etc. are discussed. The book provides new tools for handling non-probabilistic aspects of uncertainty in these problems. It is the first in this field in the world literature.

For example, if you want to increase the strength of a device, without adding too much extra weight to it, the contradiction matrix tells you that you can use "Principle 1: Segmentation," or "Principle 8: Counterweight," or "Principle 15: Dynamicity," or "Principle 40: Composite Materials.

Production engineering and management involve a series of planning and control activities in a production system. The chapters represent all areas of production management and are organized to reflect the natural order of production management tasks.

Humans have always been hopeless at predicting the future...most people now generally agree that the margin of viability in prophecy appears to be 1 ten years. Even sophisticated research endeavours in this arena tend to go 2 off the rails after a decade or so. The computer industry has been particularly prone to bold (and often way off the mark) predictions, for example: 'I think there is a world market for maybe five computers' Thomas J. Watson, IBM Chairman (1943), 'I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year' Prentice Hall Editor (1957), 'There is no reason why anyone would want a computer in their home' Ken Olsen, founder of DEC (1977) and '640K ought to be enough for anybody' Bill Gates, CEO Microsoft (1981). 3 The field of Artificial Intelligence - right from its inception - has been particularly plagued by 'bold prediction syndrome', and often by leading practitioners who should know better. AI has received a lot of bad press 4 over the decades, and a lot of it deservedly so. How often have we groaned in despair at the latest 'by the year-20xx, we will all have...(insert your own particular 'hobby horse' here - e. g.

This book provides a comprehensive set of theoretical concepts and practical tools for both defining and determining similarity between intuitionistic fuzzy sets. It describes an automatic algorithm for deriving intuitionistic fuzzy sets from data.

In the field of genetic and evolutionary algorithms (GEAs), a large amount of theory and empirical study has been focused on operators and test problems, while problem representation has often been taken as given.

The most powerful computers in the world are not only used for scientific research, defence, and business, but also in game playing. Computer games are a multi-billion dollar industry. Recent advances in computational intelligence paradigms have generated tremendous interest among researchers in the theory and implementation of games. Game theory is a branch of operational research dealing with decision theory in a competitive situation. Game theory involves the mathematical calculations and heuristics to optimize the efficient lines of play. This book presents a sample of the most recent research on the application of computational intelligence techniques in games. This book contains 7 chapters. The first chapter, by Chen, Fanelli, Castellano, and Jain, is an introduction to computational intelligence paradigms. It presents the basics of the main constituents of compu­ tational intelligence paradigms including knowledge representation, probability-based approaches, fuzzy logic, neural networks, genetic algorithms, and rough sets. In the second chapter, Chellapilla and Fogel present the evolution of a neural network to play checkers without human expertise. This chapter focuses on the use of a population of neural networks, where each network serves as an evaluation function to describe the quality of the current board position. After only a little more than 800 generations, the evolutionary process has generated a neural network that can play checkers at the expert level as designated by the u.s. Chess Federation rating system. The program developed by the authors has also competed well against commercially available software.

This book presents a systematic introduction to hesitant fuzzy theory. Coverage includes hesitant fuzzy aggregation techniques, hesitant fuzzy measures, hesitant fuzzy clustering algorithms and hesitant fuzzy multi-attribute decision making methods.

Supply Chain Management Under Fuzziness presents recently developed fuzzy models and techniques for supply chain management. These include: fuzzy PROMETHEE, fuzzy AHP, fuzzy ANP, fuzzy VIKOR, fuzzy DEMATEL, fuzzy clustering, fuzzy linear programming, and fuzzy inference systems.

Intelligent systems enhance the capacities made available by the internet and other computer-based technologies. This book deals with the theory behind the solutions to difficult problems in the construction of intelligent systems. Particular attention is paid to situations in which the available information and data may be imprecise, uncertain, incomplete or of linguistic nature. Various methodologies for these cases are discussed, among which are probabilistic, possibilistic, fuzzy, logical, evidential and network-based frameworks. One purpose of the book is to consider how these methods can be used cooperatively. Topics included in the book include fundamental issues in uncertainty, the rapidly emerging discipline of information aggregation, neural networks, bayesian networks and other network methods, as well as logic-based systems.

It gathers original scientific contributions written by top scientists in the field and covering theories, methods and applications in a number of research areas related to soft-computing, such as decision-making, probabilistic reasoning, image processing, control, neural networks and data analysis.

Applications of some selected soft computing methods to acoustics and sound engineering are presented in this book. The aim of this research study is the implementation of soft computing methods to musical signal analysis and to the recognition of musical sounds and phrases. Accordingly, some methods based on such learning algorithms as neural networks, rough sets and fuzzy-logic were conceived, implemented and tested. Additionally, the above-mentioned methods were applied to the analysis and verification of subjective testing results. The last problem discussed within the framework of this book was the problem of fuzzy control of the classical pipe organ instrument. The obtained results show that computational intelligence and soft computing may be used for solving some vital problems in both musical and architectural acoustics.

This book presents reports from the forefront of soft computing in the Internet industry and covers important topics in the field such as search engines, fuzzy query, decision analysis and support systems as well as e-business and e-commerce.

Topics range from fuzzy sets, to fuzzy logic, fuzzy mathematics, neuro-fuzzy systems, fuzzy control, decision making in fuzzy environments, image processing and many more.

This carefully edited book presents examples of the successful application of Intelligent Systems techniques to practical problems. The invited contributions, written by international experts in their respective fields, clearly demonstrate what can be achieved when AI systems are used to solve real-world problems.

This book presents recent studies on the application of Soft Computing techniques in information access on the World Wide Web. The book is divided in four parts reflecting the areas of research of the presented works such as Document Classification, Semantic Web, Web Information Retrieval and Web Applications.

This book presents the fundamental concepts of fuzzy logic and fuzzy control, chaos theory and chaos control. It also provides a definition of chaos on the metric space of fuzzy sets. The book raises many questions and generates a great potential to attract more attention to combine fuzzy systems with chaos theory.

With soft computing in humanities and the social sciences at a major turning point, this volume assembles key recent research in a field in which former distinctions between 'hard' science and the humanities are breaking down and opening up fresh horizons.

This book is a collection of selected papers presented at the Annual Meeting of the European Academy of Management and Business Economics (AEDEM), held at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Barcelona, 05 - 07 June, 2012.

This book presents recent studies on the application of Soft Computing techniques in information access on the World Wide Web. The book is divided in four parts reflecting the areas of research of the presented works such as Document Classification, Semantic Web, Web Information Retrieval and Web Applications.

Modern medicine generates, almost daily, huge amounts of heterogeneous data. Those who deal with such data understand that there is a widening gap between data collection and data comprehension.

It is quite obvious that such a relevance of decision making had triggered vast research effort on its very essence, and attempts to develop tools and techniques which would make it possible to somehow mimic human decision making related acts, even to automate decision making processes that had been so far reserved for the human beings.

This important edited volume is the first such book ever published on fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs). 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.

Being the de-facto standard for data representation and exchange over the Web, XML (Extensible Markup Language) allows the easy development of applications that exchange data over the Web.

Spatial information is pervaded by uncertainty. The concept of uncertainty by itself is understood in a broad sense, including both quantitative and more qualitative approaches, dealing with variability, epistemic uncertainty, as well as with vagueness of terms.

The simplicity and applicability of OWA operators, first introduced in the 1980s, give them intuitive appeal. This volume includes papers on the underlying theory of OWA operators as well as practical applications in vital areas such as environmental modeling.

The Self-Organizing Map (SOM) is one of the most frequently used architectures for unsupervised artificial neural networks. Introduced by Teuvo Kohonen in the 1980s, SOMs have been developed as a very powerful method for visualization and unsupervised classification tasks by an active and innovative community of interna­ tional researchers. A number of extensions and modifications have been developed during the last two decades. The reason is surely not that the original algorithm was imperfect or inad­ equate. It is rather the universal applicability and easy handling of the SOM. Com­ pared to many other network paradigms, only a few parameters need to be arranged and thus also for a beginner the network leads to useful and reliable results. Never­ theless there is scope for improvements and sophisticated new developments as this book impressively demonstrates. The number of published applications utilizing the SOM appears to be unending. As the title of this book indicates, the reader will benefit from some of the latest the­ oretical developments and will become acquainted with a number of challenging real-world applications. Our aim in producing this book has been to provide an up­ to-date treatment of the field of self-organizing neural networks, which will be ac­ cessible to researchers, practitioners and graduated students from diverse disciplines in academics and industry. We are very grateful to the father of the SOMs, Professor Teuvo Kohonen for sup­ porting this book and contributing the first chapter.