Traces the story of Lofti Zadeh, an Iranian-American professor at Berkeley who began developing fuzzy logic - the way to program computers so they can mimic the imprecise way that humans make decisions.

Since the late 1980s, a large number of very user-friendly tools for fuzzy control, fuzzy expert systems, and fuzzy data analysis have emerged. This has changed the character of this area and started the area of `fuzzy technology'. The next large step in the development occurred in 1992 when almost independently in Europe, Japan and the USA, the three areas of fuzzy technology, artificial neural nets and genetic algorithms joined forces under the title of `computational intelligence' or `soft computing'. The synergies which were possible between these three areas have been exploited very successfully. Practical Applications of Fuzzy Sets focuses on model and real applications of fuzzy sets, and is structured into four major parts: engineering and natural sciences; medicine; management; and behavioral, cognitive and social sciences. This book will be useful for practitioners of fuzzy technology, scientists and students who are looking for applications of their models and methods, for topics of their theses, and even for venture capitalists who look for attractive possibilities for investments.

The application of fuzzy technology is widely known as a technological revolution. Shortly after it appeared, its value has rapidly become appreciated. It is absolutely indispensable for introducing the latest developments not only domestically but also internationally. This book is arranged to introduce easy to understand explanations mainly centered on concrete applications. It consists of twelve chapters in total which are all independently readable and provide different approaches on various projects. The minimum of Fuzzy Theory that is needed to understand its practical applications is given in Chapter 1. Chapters 2 to 5 discuss hardware, including chips, and software tools used in constructing system. Chapters 6 to 12 cover a series of practical applications. These in clude applications for industrial processes and plants, transportation systems, which were among the first applications, and applications for consumer products such as household electrical appliances. These elements together finally produced the worldwide "Fuzzy Boom". This book can be read by a wide variety of people, from undergraduate and graduate students in universities to practical engineers and project managers working in plants. The information contained in this book is a first step to this field of interest.

This book provides readers with a timely and comprehensive yet concise view on the field of fuzzy logic and its real-world applications. The chapters, written by authoritative scholars in the field, report on promising new models for data analysis, decision making, and systems modeling, with a special emphasis on their applications in management science. The book is a token of appreciation from the fuzzy research community to Professor Christer Carlsson for his long time research and organizational commitment, which have among other things resulted in the foundation and success of the Institute for Advanced Management Systems Research (IAMSR) at Åbo Akademi University, in Åbo (Turku), Finland. The book serves as timely guide for the fuzzy logic and operations research communities alike.

This book introduces a dynamic, on-line fuzzy inference system. In this system membership functions and control rules are not determined until the system is applied and each output of its lookup table is calculated based on current inputs. The book describes the real-world uses of new fuzzy techniques to simplify readers’ tuning processes and enhance the performance of their control systems. It further contains application examples.

In the past decade a critical mass of work that uses fuzzy logic for autonomous vehicle navigation has been reported. Unfortunately, reports of this work are scattered among conference, workshop, and journal publications that belong to different research communities (fuzzy logic, robotics, artificial intelligence, intelligent control) and it is therefore not easily accessible either to the new comer or to the specialist. As a result, researchers in this area may end up reinventing things while being unaware of important existing work. We believe that research and applications based on fuzzy logic in the field of autonomous vehicle navigation have now reached a sufficient level of maturity, and that it should be suitably reported to the largest possible group of interested practitioners, researches, and students. On these grounds, we have endeavored to collect some of the most representative pieces of work in one volume to be used as a reference. Our aim was to provide a volume which is more than "yet another random collection of papers," and gives the reader some added value with respect to the individual papers. In order to achieve this goal we have aimed at: • Selecting contributions which are representative of a wide range of prob lems and solutions and which have been validated on real robots; and • Setting the individual contributions in a clear framework, that identifies the main problems of autonomous robotics for which solutions based on fuzzy logic have been proposed.

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