Martine Ceberio - Böcker

This book describes the latest findings related to fuzzy techniques, discussing applications in control, economics, education, humor studies, industrial engineering, linguistics, management, marketing, medicine and public health, military engineering, robotics, ship design, sports, transportation, and many other areas. It also presents recent fuzzy-related algorithms and theoretical results that can be used in other application areas.Featuring selected papers from the Joint World Congress of the International Fuzzy Systems Association (IFSA) and the Annual Conference of the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society (NAFIPS) IFSA-NAFIPS’2019, held in Lafayette, Louisiana, USA, on June 18–21, 2019, the book is of interest to practitioners wanting to use fuzzy techniques to process imprecise expert knowledge. It is also a valuable resource for researchers wishing to extend the ideas from these papers to new application areas, for graduate students and for anyone else interested in problems involving fuzziness and uncertainty.

This book presents extended versions of selected papers from the annual International Workshops on Constraint Programming and Decision Making from 2016 to 2018. In many application areas, it is necessary to make effective decisions under constraints, and there are several area-specific techniques for such decision problems.

This book presents extended versions of selected papers from the annual International Workshops on Constraint Programming and Decision Making from 2016 to 2018. In many application areas, it is necessary to make effective decisions under constraints, and there are several area-specific techniques for such decision problems.

This book shows how to provide uncertainty-related theoretical justification for empirical dependencies, on the examples from numerous application areas.

This book shows how to provide uncertainty-related theoretical justification for empirical dependencies, on the examples from numerous application areas.

This book describes how to use expert knowledge—which is often formulated by using imprecise (fuzzy) words from a natural language.

The book can be recommended to researchers and students in these application areas.Many of the examples use general techniques that can be used in other application areas as well, so it is also useful for practitioners and researchers in other areas who are looking for possible theoretical explanations of empirical formulas and techniques.

This book shows, on numerous examples, how to make decisions in realistic situations when we have both uncertainty and constraints. In most these situations, the book's emphasis is on the why-question, i.e., on a theoretical explanation for empirical formulas and techniques. Such explanations are important: they help understand why these techniques work well in some cases and not so well in others, and thus, help practitioners decide whether a technique is appropriate for a given situation. Example of applications described in the book ranges from science (biosciences, geosciences, and physics) to electrical and civil engineering, education, psychology and decision making, and religion—and, of course, include computer science, AI (in particular, eXplainable AI), and machine learning. The book can be recommended to researchers and students in these application areas.Many of the examples use general techniques that can be used in other application areas as well, so it is also useful for practitioners and researchers in other areas who are looking for possible theoretical explanations of empirical formulas and techniques.

In the first approximation, decision making is nothing else but an optimization problem: We want to select the best alternative. This description, however, is not fully accurate: it implicitly assumes that we know the exact consequences of each decision, and that, once we have selected a decision, no constraints prevent us from implementing it. In reality, we usually know the consequences with some uncertainty, and there are also numerous constraints that needs to be taken into account. The presence of uncertainty and constraints makes decision making challenging. To resolve these challenges, we need to go beyond simple optimization, we also need to get a good understanding of how the corresponding systems and objects operate, a good understanding of why we observe what we observe – this will help us better predict what will be the consequences of different decisions. All these problems – in relation to different application areas – are the main focus of this book.

In the first approximation, decision making is nothing else but an optimization problem: We want to select the best alternative.

In many application areas, it is necessary to make effective decisions under constraints. Several area-specific techniques are known for such decision problems; however, because these techniques are area-specific, it is not easy to apply each technique to other applications areas. Cross-fertilization between different application areas is one of the main objectives of the annual International Workshops on Constraint Programming and Decision Making. Those workshops, held in the US (El Paso, Texas), in Europe (Lyon, France) and in Asia (Novosibirsk, Russia), from 2008 to 2012, have attracted researchers and practitioners from all over the world. This volume presents extended versions of selected papers from those workshops. These papers deal with all stages of decision making under constraints: (1) formulating the problem of multi-criteria decision making in precise terms, (2) determining when the corresponding decision problem is algorithmically solvable; (3) finding the corresponding algorithms and making these algorithms as efficient as possible and (4) taking into account interval, probabilistic and fuzzy uncertainty inherent in the corresponding decision making problems. The resulting application areas include environmental studies (selecting the best location for a meteorological tower), biology (selecting the most probable evolution history of a species), and engineering (designing the best control for a magnetic levitation train).

These papers deal with all stages of decision making under constraints: (1) formulating the problem of multi-criteria decision making in precise terms, (2) determining when the corresponding decision problem is algorithmically solvable;

This book describes new algorithms and ideas for making effective decisions under constraints, including applications in control engineering, manufacturing (how to optimally determine the production level), econometrics (how to better predict stock market behavior), and environmental science and geosciences (how to combine data of different types). It also describes general algorithms and ideas that can be used in other application areas.The book presents extended versions of selected papers from the annual International Workshops on Constraint Programming and Decision Making (CoProd’XX) from 2013 to 2016. These workshops, held in the US (El Paso, Texas) and in Europe (Würzburg, Germany, and Uppsala, Sweden), have attracted researchers and practitioners from all over the world.It is of interest to practitioners who benefit from the new techniques, to researchers who want to extend the ideas from these papers to new application areas and/or further improve the corresponding algorithms, and to graduate students who want to learn more – in short, to anyone who wants to make more effective decisions under constraints.