IntroductIon Functional dependencies represent a fundamental concept in the design of a database since they are capable of capturing some semantics of the data strongly connected with the occurrence of redundancy in a database. The development of applications working on fuzzy and multimedia databases has required the extension of the functional dependency notion to these new types of data. Unfo...

Article history: Available online 28 June 2012

An imprecise point is a point p with an associated imprecision region Ip indicating the set of possible locations of the point p. We study separability problems for a set R of red imprecise points and a set B of blue imprecise points in R, where the imprecision regions are axis-aligned rectangles and each point p ∈ R∪B is drawn uniformly at random from Ip. Our results include algorithms for fin...

A technique to perform design calculations on imprecise representations of parameters has been developed and is presented. The level of imprecision in the description of design elements is typically high in the preliminary phase of engineering design. This imprecision is represented using the fuzzy calculus. Calculations can be performed using this method, to produce (imprecise) performance par...

In this paper we introduce convex imprecise previsions as a special class of imprecise previsions, showing that they retain or generalise most of the relevant properties of coherent imprecise previsions but are not necessarily positively homogeneous. The broader class of weakly convex imprecise previsions is also studied and its fundamental properties are demonstrated. The notions of weak conve...

Properties of convex and monotone capacities of infinite order in Polish spaces are studied and used to justify the representation of certain situations of imprecise risk (imprecisely known probabilities) by lower probabilities, which are monotone of infinite order. Decision making with imprecise risk is then modeled, and linear utility theory is shown to be generalizable to the case of impreci...

I many circumstances, evaluations are based on empirical data. However, some observations may be imprecise, meaning that it is not entirely clear what occurred in them. We address the question of how beliefs are formed in these situations. The individual in our model is essentially a “frequentist.” He first makes a subjective judgment about the occurrence of the event for each imprecise observa...

We present new results in fixed priority scheduling for imprecise computation in real-time systems. Imprecise computation has not been popularized enough for reasons which are rooted from the task model, scheduling methods (EDF-based) and general system support. Audsley et al. have devised schedulability tests for guaranteeing mandatory computation while incorporating unbounded optional compone...

Many software test generation techniques target on generating software test data. Only a few of them provide automatic way to verify if software behaves correctly using generated test data. We propose a testing technique, which uses UML modeling language extension OCL as imprecise test oracle. Imprecise OCL constraints can be viewed as expressions which define expected results within some range...

A technique to perform design calculations on imprecise representations of parameters has been developed and is presented. The level of imprecision in the description of design elements is typically high in the preliminary phase of engineering design. This imprecision is represented using the fuzzy calculus. Calculations can be performed using this method, to produce (imprecise) performance par...