Fuzzy Logic

This book focuses on both the engineering applications of fuzzy logic and soft computing and its social applications and philosophical insights at the dawn of the third millennium. The included papers clearly demonstrate that fuzzy logic revolutionizes general approaches to solving applied problems and reveals deep connections between those approaches and the underlying unique theoretical framework. The book consists of three parts: Understanding Society, Mathematics, and Modelling and Control Systems. The first part reveals different aspects of fuzziology, a new study of fuzziness inherent in human knowledge. The second part explores the mathematical foundations of soft computing, while the third part elicits its innovative engineering applications.

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At the beginning of the new millennium, fuzzy logic opens a new challenging perspective in information processing. This perspective emerges out of the ideas of the founder of fuzzy logic - Lotfi Zadeh, to develop 'soft' tools for direct computing with human perceptions. The enigmatic nature of human perceptions manifests in their unique capacity to generalize, extract patterns and capture both the essence and the integrity of the events and phenomena in human life. This capacity goes together with an intrinsic imprecision of the perception-based information. According to Zadeh, it is because of the imprecision of the human imprecision that they do not lend themselves to meaning representation through the use of precise methods based on predicate logic. This is the principal reason why existing scientific theories do not have the capability to operate on perception-based information. We are at the eve of the emergence of a theory with such a capability. Its applicative effectiveness has been already demonstrated through the industrial implementation of the soft computing - a powerful intelligent technology centred in fuzzy logic. At the focus of the papers included in this book is the knowledge and experience of the researchers in relation both to the engineering applications of soft computing and to its social and philosophical implications at the dawn of the third millennium. The papers clearly demonstrate that Fuzzy Logic revolutionizes general approaches for solving applied problems and reveals deep connections between them and their solutions.