Applied Systems and Cybernetics, Volume IV: Systems Research in Health Care, Biocybernetics and Ecology documents the proceedings of the International Congress on Applied Systems Research and Cybernetics. This volume compiles papers that present several concepts of health care and reflect thinking in this field. This book introduces various health care systems and models, and then tackles some issues on managing the long-term health care facility. A special information system for public health is also described in this volume. This text will be invaluable to those interested in systems research and its applications to a variety of fields, including health care.

The developments of fuzzy systems and fuzzy logic is permeating through the diverse branches of science where uncertainty has to be considered laying on the foundations and applicative developments. CIFT and MEPP conferences have been held in different venues in Scandinavia and Italy since 1990, and have stimulated the attention from academia and industry toward the novelties introduced by fuzzy logic and fuzzy systems theory. The papers presented in this volume are concerned with a wide vision of modern perspectives of science. These cover research areas such as management, financial and economic applications, urbanism and ecology, astronomical engineering, medical diagnosis and imaging, and human behavior.

Fundamentals of Fuzzy Sets covers the basic elements of fuzzy set theory. Its four-part organization provides easy referencing of recent as well as older results in the field. The first part discusses the historical emergence of fuzzy sets, and delves into fuzzy set connectives, and the representation and measurement of membership functions. The second part covers fuzzy relations, including orderings, similarity, and relational equations. The third part, devoted to uncertainty modelling, introduces possibility theory, contrasting and relating it with probabilities, and reviews information measures of specificity and fuzziness. The last part concerns fuzzy sets on the real line - computation with fuzzy intervals, metric topology of fuzzy numbers, and the calculus of fuzzy-valued functions. Each chapter is written by one or more recognized specialists and offers a tutorial introduction to the topics, together with an extensive bibliography.