Many business decisions are made in the absence of complete information about the decision consequences. Credit lines are approved without knowing the future behavior of the customers; stocks are bought and sold without knowing their future prices; parts are manufactured without knowing all the factors affecting their final quality; etc. All these cases can be categorized as decision making under uncertainty. Decision makers (human or automated) can handle uncertainty in different ways. Deferring the decision due to the lack of sufficient information may not be an option, especially in...

Intelligent systems are now being used more commonly than in the past. These involve cognitive, evolving and artificial-life, robotic, and decision- making systems, to name a few. Due to the tremendous speed of development, on both fundamental and technological levels, it is virtually impossible to offer an up-to-date, yet comprehensive overview of this field. Nevertheless, the need for a volume presenting recent developments and trends in this domain is huge, and the demand for such a volume is continually increasing in industrial and academic engineering 1 communities. Although there are a...

This book presents an innovative approach to verifying and validating rule-based expert systems. It features a complete set of techniques and tools that provide a more formal, objective, and automated means of carrying out verification and validation procedures. Many of the concepts behind these procedures have been adapted from conventional software, while others have required that new techniques or tools be created because of the uniqueness of rule-based expert systems. Verification and Validation of Rule-Based Expert Systems is a valuable reference for electrical engineers, software...

A sharp increase in the computing power of modern computers has triggered the development of powerful algorithms that can analyze complex patterns in large amounts of data within a short time period. Consequently, it has become possible to apply pattern recognition techniques to new tasks. The main goal of this book is to cover some of the latest application domains of pattern recognition while presenting novel techniques that have been developed or customized in those domains.

The volumes deal with the newly emerging field of �Risk and Hazard Assessment� and its application to science and engineering. These volumes deal with issues such as short-and long-term hazards, setting priorities in safety, fault analysis for process plants, hazard identification and safety assessment of human- robot systems, plant fault diagnoses expert systems, knowledge based diagnostic systems, fault tree analysis, modelling of computer security systems for risk and reliability analysis, risk analysis of fatigue failure, fault evaluation of complex system,...

The volumes deal with the newly emerging field of �Risk and Hazard Assessment� and its application to science and engineering. These volumes deal with issues such as short-and long-term hazards, setting priorities in safety, fault analysis for process plants, hazard identification and safety assessment of human- robot systems, plant fault diagnoses expert systems, knowledge based diagnostic systems, fault tree analysis, modelling of computer security systems for risk and reliability analysis, risk analysis of fatigue failure, fault evaluation of complex system,...