The use of fuzzy logic for the modeling of processes (such as a technical process or the behavior of a human operator in a process) is often motivated by the interpretability of the resulting fuzzy system/model. In fuzzy models, the dependencies of the variables of the considered process are described by qualitative (linguistic) if–then rules, which correspond to the way in which human knowledg...

Decision-making on outsourcing biomass supply operations for bioenergy production is both of strategic and operational importance and can be modeled as a multi-perspective supplier selection problem characterized by multiple qualitative and quantitative factors, as well as technical and non-technical attributes and constraints. The biomass supply system presents unique features that highly impa...

Recently, performance profiles in reading, mathematics and science were created using the data collectively available in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2011. In addition, a classification of children to the end of their primary school years was conducted in accordance with these performance types...

We try to provide a tentative assessment of the role of fuzzy sets in decision analysis. We discuss membership functions, aggregation operations, linguistic variables, fuzzy intervals and the valued preference relations they induce. The importance of the notion of bipolarity and the potential of qualitative evaluation methods are also pointed out. We take a critical standpoint on where we stand...

This paper presents a survey on the ex isting methods for the stability analysis of fuzzy control systems including both conventional Mamdani s rule based fuzzy controllers and Takagi Sugeno controllers The overview considers several approaches including input output stability frequency response methods Lyapunov techniques and qualitative methods The paper also sumarizes the new stability techn...

In the paper a qualitative approach to the problem of aggregation of information is discussed. The method is based on the notion of fuzzy attribute model of the aggregation problem in which information is represented in the form of fuzzy constraints on the values of attributes. The aggregate is built by carrying out logical inference on the knowledge base which represents the decision maker pre...

The paper presents the method developed to assess rating points of objects with qualitative indexes. The novelty of the method lies in the fact that the authors use linguistic scales that allow to formalize the values of the indexes with the help of fuzzy sets. As a result it is possible to operate correctly with dissimilar indexes on the unified basis and to get stable final results. The obtai...

A complicated decision-making problem such as environmental impact assessment usually requires both quantitative and qualitative decision support tools to collaborate for reaping their benefits concurrently. Although the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) has been widely used in EIA, it is hardly to address the dependence issue among environmental factors and reflect the subjectivity between scie...

1. Introduction Qualitative reasoning is an approach for dealing with commonsense knowledge without using numerical computation. Instead, one tries to represent knowledge using a limited vocabulary such as qualitative relationships between entities or qualitative categories of numerical values, for instance, using {+, −, 0} for representing real values. An important motivation for using a quali...