New trends in fuzzy modeling. part II: applications

Nowadays, one of the most important areas of application of fuzzy set theory are fuzzy rule-based systems. These kinds of systems constitute an extension of classical rule-based systems, because they deal with “IF-THEN” rules whose antecedents and consequents are composed of fuzzy logic statements instead of classical logic. They have been successfully applied to a wide range of problems in different domains for which uncertainty and vagueness emerge in different ways. The current special issues on “New trends in fuzzy modeling (Part I: Novel approaches and Part II: Applications) collect several contributions by experts in the topic that go beyond on the design of fuzzy systems with a balance between new developments and applications. This second issue is devoted to different representative applications of fuzzy systems in different areas, analysing the benefits of using them in these domains. The application domains are power robotic, market, transfer passenger movements and the finding of fuzzy sequential patterns from quantitative data for real-world applications. The papers in this issue can be classified according to their application domain. The first three papers in this issue belong to the first group, robotic. In the first paper, entitled “Hierarchical fuzzy rule based systems using an information theoretic approach”, A. Waldock et al. propose a novel anytime algorithm for the construction of a Hierarchical Fuzzy Based System using an information theoretic approach to specialise rules that do not effectively model the decision space. The proposed approach is demonstrated on a mobile robot application in simulation. M. Mucientes et al. propose an evolutionary fuzzy system based on the Iterative Rule Learning approach in the paper “Evolutionary learning of a fuzzy controller for wall-follow-