Fuzzy logic in narrow sense is a promising new chapter of formal logic whose basic ideas were formulated by Lotfi Zadeh (see Zadeh 1975]a). The aim of this theory is to formalize the "approximate reasoning" we use in everyday life, the object of investigation being the human aptitude to manage vague properties (as, for example, "beautiful," "small," "plausible," "believable," etc. ) that by their own nature can be satisfied to a degree different from 0 (false) and I (true). It is worth noting that the traditional deductive framework in many-valued logic is different from the one adopted in...

The present volume collects selected papers arising from lectures delivered by the authors at the School on Fuzzy Logic and Soft Computing held during the years 1996/97/98/99 and sponsored by the Salerno University. The authors contributing to this volume agreed with editors to write down, to enlarge and, in many cases, to rethink their original lectures, in order to offer to readership, a more compact presentation of the proposed topics. The aim of the volume is to offer a picture, as a job in progress, of the effort that is coming in founding and developing soft computing's techniques. The...