This book explores non-extensive statistical mechanics in non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and presents an overview of the strong nonlinearity of chaos and complexity in natural systems, drawing on relevant mathematics from topology, measure-theory, inverse and ill-posed problems, set-valued analysis, and nonlinear functional analysis. It offers a self-contained theory of complexity and complex systems as the steady state of non-equilibrium systems, denoting a homeostatic dynamic equilibrium between stabilizing order and destabilizing disorder.

A more intuitive, easy and powerful representation, access, and retrieval of information is nowadays a necessary feature of information systems that have become a common instrument for a wide class of users in di?erent areas and for the most diversi?ed tasks. The management of imprecision and uncertainty in databases has become an important research area, which has known an impressive growth. This is testi?ed the increasing number of special sessions in international conferences and workshops devoted to this theme. Generally, this topic matured and developed independently within both the...

This book covers in a great depth the fast growing topic of tools, techniques and applications of soft computing (e.g., fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, neural networks, rough sets, Bayesian networks, and other probabilistic techniques) in the ontologies and the Semantic Web. The author shows how components of the Semantic Web (like the RDF, Description Logics, ontologies) can be covered with a soft computing methodology.

Industrial Engineering (IE) is concerned with the design, improvement, and installation of integrated systems of people, material, equipment, and energy. Industrial engineers face many problems with incomplete and vague information in these systems since the characteristics of these problems often require this kind of information. Fuzzy sets approaches are usually most appropriate when human evaluations and the modeling of human knowledge are needed. IE brings a significant number of applications of fuzzy set theory.

After an introductory chapter explaining the recent status of...

1. 1 Background The basis for the material in this book centers around research done in an ongoing long-term project which focuses on the development of highly au- 1 tonomousunmannedaerialvehiclesystems. Theactualplatformwhichserves as a case study for the research in this book will be described in detail later in this chapter. Before doing that, a brief background of the motivations - hind this research will be provided. One of the main research topics in the project is knowledge representation and reasoning and its use in Uav pl- forms. A very strong constraint has been placed on the nature...

Clustering has been around for many decades and located itself in a uniquepositionasafundamentalconceptualandalgorithmiclandmark of data analysis. Almost since the very inception of fuzzy sets, the role and potential of these information granules in revealing and describing structureindatawasfullyacknowledgedandappreciated.Asamatter of fact, with the rapid growth of volumes of digital information, the role of clustering becomes even more visible and critical. Furthermore given the anticipated human centricity of the majority of artifacts of digitaleraandacontinuousbuildupofmountainsofdata,...

We describe in this book, new methods for analysis and design of hybrid intelligent systems using soft computing techniques. Soft Computing (SC) consists of several computing paradigms, including fuzzy logic, neural networks, and genetic algorithms, which can be used to produce powerful hybrid intelligent systems for solving problems in pattern recognition, time series prediction, intelligent control, robotics and automation. Hybrid int- ligent systems that combine several SC techniques are needed due to the complexity and high dimensionality of real-world problems. Hybrid int- ligent systems...

This book presents recent developments in automatic text analysis. Providing an overview of linguistic modeling, it collects contributions of authors from a multidisciplinary area that focus on the topic of automatic text analysis from different perspectives. It includes chapters on cognitive modeling and visual systems modeling, and contributes to the computational linguistic and information theoretical grounding of automatic text analysis.

This volume provides readers with selected fuzzy and rough tools used to medical tasks, especially diagnosing and medication. To build a link between theoretical, mathematical excerpts and practical medical applications, the contents is formed as a sequence of occurrences in which a patient appears to be diagnosed and cured. The fuzzy and rough elements are inserted in the book in the order required by the presentation of medical substance to maintain the logical unity of the book??'s essence.

In conformity with this pattern the essay presents in turn some...

A main topic in welfare economics is the rational behaviour of a consumer when, faced with various prices and incomes, he has to make a choice. The theory of consumption establishes the framework in which the rationality of consumers is de?ned and the principle on which it is based. By 109], "the rationality of a consumer may be described by postulating that a consumer has a de?nite preference over all conceivable commodity bundles and that he chooses those commodity bundles that are optimal with respect to his preference subject to budgetary constraints." Samuelson's theory of revealed...