In particular in the 'meningitis belt' of sub-Saharan Africa, epidemic meningococcal meningitis is a severe public health problem. In the past decades, serogroup A lineages have been the dominant etiologic agents, but also other serogroups have caused outbreaks. A comprehensive vaccine based on subcapsular outer membrane proteins (OMPs) is not available. Here, we have investigated whether menin...

This paper presents a methodology for quantitative risk analysis for offshore installations, that incorporates both technical and operational conditions. The basic building blocks of the methodology are barrier block diagrams, event trees, fault trees, and influence diagrams. Barrier block diagrams are used to illustrate the event scenarios and the effect of barrier systems on the scenarios. Ev...

Over the years, various methodologies have been investigated and proposed to deal with continuous or numeric data which is very common in any application. With the increasing popularity of fuzzy representation, researchers have proposed to utilize fuzzy logic in decision trees to deal with the situations. This paper presents a survey of current methodology to design FDT (Fuzzy Decision Tree), v...

Inductive learning that creates decision trees from a set of existing cases is useful for automated knowledge acquisition. Most of the existing methods in literature are based on crisp concepts that are weak in handling marginal cases. In this paper, we present a fuzzy inductive learning method that integrates the fuzzy set theory into the regular inductive learning processes. The method conver...

PSA tries to assess the whole spectrum of risk presented by a hazardous plant or operation. It does this by systematically modelling a great number of different accident sequences. The main cause of possible public or environmental harm from an accident in a nuclear plant is the radioactive release that may result, so PSA attempts to assess the frequency of occurrence of the whole range of such...

An inverse minimum spanning tree problem is to make the least modification on the edge weights such that a predetermined spanning tree is a minimum spanning tree with respect to the new edge weights. In this paper, a type of fuzzy inverse minimum spanning tree problem is introduced from a LAN reconstruction problem, where the weights of edges are assumed to be fuzzy variables. The concept of fu...