A Multiple Attribute Decision Making Approach Based on New Similarity Measures of Interval-valued Hesitant Fuzzy Sets

Hesitant fuzzy sets, as an extension of fuzzy sets to deal with uncertainty, have attracted much attention since its introduction, in both theory and application aspects. The present work is focused on the interval-valued hesitant fuzzy sets (IVHFSs) to manage additional uncertainty. Now that distance and similarity as a kind of information measures are essential and important numerical indexes in fuzzy set theory and all their extensions, the present work aims at investigating distance and similarity measures in the IVHFSs and then employing them into multiple attribute decision making application. To begin with, II-type generalized interval-valued hesitant fuzzy distance is firstly introduced in the IVHFS, along with its properties and its relationships with the traditional Hamming-Distance and the Euclidean distance. Afterwards, another interval-valued hesitant fuzzy Lp distance based on Lp metric is proposed and its relationship with the Hausdorff distance is discussed. In addition, different from most of similarity measures with dependent on the corresponding distances, a new similarity measure based on set-theoretic approach for IVHFSs is introduced and its properties are discussed; especially, a relative similarity measure is proposed based on the positive ideal IVHFS and the negative ideal IVHFS. Finally, we describe how the IVHFS and its relative similarity measure can be applied to multiple attribute decision making. A numerical example is then provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method

A document management methodology based on similarity contents

The advent of the WWW and distributed information systems have made it possible to share documents between different users and organisations. However, this has created many problems related to the security, accessibility, right and most importantly the consistency of documents. It is important that the people involved in the documents management process have access to the most up-to-date version of documents, retrieve the correct documents and should be able to update the documents repository in such a way that his or her document are known to others. In this paper we propose a method for organising, storing and retrieving documents based on similarity contents. The method uses techniques based on information retrieval, document indexation and term extraction and indexing. This methodology is developed for the E-Cognos project which aims at developing tools for the management and sharing of documents in the construction domain

Observer-biased bearing condition monitoring: from fault detection to multi-fault classification

Bearings are simultaneously a fundamental component and one of the principal causes of failure in rotary machinery. The work focuses on the employment of fuzzy clustering for bearing condition monitoring, i.e., fault detection and classification. The output of a clustering algorithm is a data partition (a set of clusters) which is merely a hypothesis on the structure of the data. This hypothesis requires validation by domain experts. In general, clustering algorithms allow a limited usage of domain knowledge on the cluster formation process. In this study, a novel method allowing for interactive clustering in bearing fault diagnosis is proposed. The method resorts to shrinkage to generalize an otherwise unbiased clustering algorithm into a biased one. In this way, the method provides a natural and intuitive way to control the cluster formation process, allowing for the employment of domain knowledge to guiding it. The domain expert can select a desirable level of granularity ranging from fault detection to classification of a variable number of faults and can select a specific region of the feature space for detailed analysis. Moreover, experimental results under realistic conditions show that the adopted algorithm outperforms the corresponding unbiased algorithm (fuzzy c-means) which is being widely used in this type of problems. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Grant number: 145602