Traditional Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems adopted symbolic processing as their main paradigm. Symbolic AI systems have proved effective in handling problems characterized by exact and complete knowledge representation. Unfortunately, these systems have very little power in dealing with imprecise, uncertain and incomplete data and information which significantly contribute to the description of many real- world problems, both physical systems and processes as well as mechanisms of decision making. Moreover, there are many situations where the expert domain knowledge (the basis for many...

Traditional Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems adopted symbolic processing as their main paradigm. Symbolic AI systems have proved effective in handling problems characterized by exact and complete knowledge representation. Unfortunately, these systems have very little power in dealing with imprecise, uncertain and incomplete data and information which significantly contribute to the description of many real- world problems, both physical systems and processes as well as mechanisms of decision making. Moreover, there are many situations where the expert domain knowledge (the basis for many...