Some views on information fusion and logic based approaches in decision making under uncertainty

Decision making under uncertainty is a key issue in information fusion and logic based reasoning approaches. The aim of this paper is to show noteworthy theoretical and applicational issues in the area of decision making under uncertainty that have been already done and raise new open research related to these topics pointing out promising and challenging research gaps that should be addressed in the coming future in order to improve the resolution of decision making problems under uncertainty

Geometric Fuzzy Logic Systems

There has recently been a significant increase in academic interest in the field oftype-2 fuzzy sets and systems. Type-2 fuzzy systems offer the ability to model and reason with uncertain concepts. When faced with uncertainties type-2 fuzzy systems should, theoretically, give an increase in performance over type-l fuzzy systems. However, the computational complexity of generalised type-2 fuzzy systems is significantly higher than type-l systems. A direct consequence of this is that, prior to this thesis, generalised type-2 fuzzy logic has not yet been applied in a time critical domain, such as control. Control applications are the main application area of type-l fuzzy systems with the literature reporting many successes in this area. Clearly the computational complexity oftype-2 fuzzy logic is holding the field back. This restriction on the development oftype-2 fuzzy systems is tackled in this research. This thesis presents the novel approach ofdefining fuzzy sets as geometric objects - geometric fuzzy sets. The logical operations for geometric fuzzy sets are defined as geometric manipulations of these sets. This novel geometric approach is applied to type-I, type-2 interval and generalised type-2 fuzzy sets and systems. The major contribution of this research is the reduction in the computational complexity oftype-2 fuzzy logic that results from the application of the geometric approach. This reduction in computational complexity is so substantial that generalised type-2 fuzzy logic has, for the first time, been successfully applied to a control problem - mobile robot navigation. A detailed comparison between the performance of the generalised type-2 fuzzy controller and the performance of the type-l and type-2 interval controllers is given. The results indicate that the generalised type-2 fuzzy logic controller outperforms the other robot controllers. This outcome suggests that generalised type-2 fuzzy systems can offer an improved performance over type-l and type-2 interval systems