10 research outputs found

    A review of applications of fuzzy sets to safety and reliability engineering

    Get PDF
    Safety and reliability are rigorously assessed during the design of dependable systems. Probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) processes are comprehensive, structured and logical methods widely used for this purpose. PRA approaches include, but not limited to Fault Tree Analysis (FTA), Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), and Event Tree Analysis (ETA). In conventional PRA, failure data about components is required for the purposes of quantitative analysis. In practice, it is not always possible to fully obtain this data due to unavailability of primary observations and consequent scarcity of statistical data about the failure of components. To handle such situations, fuzzy set theory has been successfully used in novel PRA approaches for safety and reliability evaluation under conditions of uncertainty. This paper presents a review of fuzzy set theory based methodologies applied to safety and reliability engineering, which include fuzzy FTA, fuzzy FMEA, fuzzy ETA, fuzzy Bayesian networks, fuzzy Markov chains, and fuzzy Petri nets. Firstly, we describe relevant fundamentals of fuzzy set theory and then we review applications of fuzzy set theory to system safety and reliability analysis. The review shows the context in which each technique may be more appropriate and highlights the overall potential usefulness of fuzzy set theory in addressing uncertainty in safety and reliability engineering

    Fitting aggregation operators to data

    Full text link
    Theoretical advances in modelling aggregation of information produced a wide range of aggregation operators, applicable to almost every practical problem. The most important classes of aggregation operators include triangular norms, uninorms, generalised means and OWA operators.With such a variety, an important practical problem has emerged: how to fit the parameters/ weights of these families of aggregation operators to observed data? How to estimate quantitatively whether a given class of operators is suitable as a model in a given practical setting? Aggregation operators are rather special classes of functions, and thus they require specialised regression techniques, which would enforce important theoretical properties, like commutativity or associativity. My presentation will address this issue in detail, and will discuss various regression methods applicable specifically to t-norms, uninorms and generalised means. I will also demonstrate software implementing these regression techniques, which would allow practitioners to paste their data and obtain optimal parameters of the chosen family of operators.<br /

    Handling imperfect information in criterion evaluation, aggregation and indexing

    Get PDF

    Fuzzy Sets, Fuzzy Logic and Their Applications 2020

    Get PDF
    The present book contains the 24 total articles accepted and published in the Special Issue “Fuzzy Sets, Fuzzy Logic and Their Applications, 2020” of the MDPI Mathematics journal, which covers a wide range of topics connected to the theory and applications of fuzzy sets and systems of fuzzy logic and their extensions/generalizations. These topics include, among others, elements from fuzzy graphs; fuzzy numbers; fuzzy equations; fuzzy linear spaces; intuitionistic fuzzy sets; soft sets; type-2 fuzzy sets, bipolar fuzzy sets, plithogenic sets, fuzzy decision making, fuzzy governance, fuzzy models in mathematics of finance, a philosophical treatise on the connection of the scientific reasoning with fuzzy logic, etc. It is hoped that the book will be interesting and useful for those working in the area of fuzzy sets, fuzzy systems and fuzzy logic, as well as for those with the proper mathematical background and willing to become familiar with recent advances in fuzzy mathematics, which has become prevalent in almost all sectors of the human life and activity

    Fuzzy Sets, Fuzzy Logic and Their Applications

    Get PDF
    The present book contains 20 articles collected from amongst the 53 total submitted manuscripts for the Special Issue “Fuzzy Sets, Fuzzy Loigic and Their Applications” of the MDPI journal Mathematics. The articles, which appear in the book in the series in which they were accepted, published in Volumes 7 (2019) and 8 (2020) of the journal, cover a wide range of topics connected to the theory and applications of fuzzy systems and their extensions and generalizations. This range includes, among others, management of the uncertainty in a fuzzy environment; fuzzy assessment methods of human-machine performance; fuzzy graphs; fuzzy topological and convergence spaces; bipolar fuzzy relations; type-2 fuzzy; and intuitionistic, interval-valued, complex, picture, and Pythagorean fuzzy sets, soft sets and algebras, etc. The applications presented are oriented to finance, fuzzy analytic hierarchy, green supply chain industries, smart health practice, and hotel selection. This wide range of topics makes the book interesting for all those working in the wider area of Fuzzy sets and systems and of fuzzy logic and for those who have the proper mathematical background who wish to become familiar with recent advances in fuzzy mathematics, which has entered to almost all sectors of human life and activity

    Dynamic adaptation of user profiles in recommender systems

    Get PDF
    In a period of time in which the content available through the Internet increases exponentially and is more easily accessible every day, techniques for aiding the selection and extraction of important and personalised information are of vital importance. Recommender Systems (RS) appear as a tool to help the user in a decision making process by evaluating a set of objects or alternatives and aiding the user at choosing which one/s of them suits better his/her interests or preferences. Those preferences need to be accurate enough to produce adequate recommendations and should be updated if the user changes his/her likes or if they are incorrect or incomplete. In this work an adequate model for managing user preferences in a multi-attribute (numerical and categorical) environment is presented to aid at providing recommendations in those kinds of contexts. The evaluation process of the recommender system designed is supported by a new aggregation operator (Unbalanced LOWA) that enables the combination of the information that defines an alternative into a single value, which then is used to rank the whole set of alternatives. After the recommendation has been made, learning processes have been designed to evaluate the user interaction with the system to find out, in a dynamic and unsupervised way, if the user profile in which the recommendation process relies on needs to be updated with new preferences. The work detailed in this document also includes extensive evaluation and testing of all the elements that take part in the recommendation and learning processes

    Z-Numbers-Based Approach to Hotel Service Quality Assessment

    Get PDF
    In this study, we are analyzing the possibility of using Z-numbers for measuring the service quality and decision-making for quality improvement in the hotel industry. Techniques used for these purposes are based on consumer evalu- ations - expectations and perceptions. As a rule, these evaluations are expressed in crisp numbers (Likert scale) or fuzzy estimates. However, descriptions of the respondent opinions based on crisp or fuzzy numbers formalism not in all cases are relevant. The existing methods do not take into account the degree of con- fidence of respondents in their assessments. A fuzzy approach better describes the uncertainties associated with human perceptions and expectations. Linguis- tic values are more acceptable than crisp numbers. To consider the subjective natures of both service quality estimates and confidence degree in them, the two- component Z-numbers Z = (A, B) were used. Z-numbers express more adequately the opinion of consumers. The proposed and computationally efficient approach (Z-SERVQUAL, Z-IPA) allows to determine the quality of services and iden- tify the factors that required improvement and the areas for further development. The suggested method was applied to evaluate the service quality in small and medium-sized hotels in Turkey and Azerbaijan, illustrated by the example

    Collected Papers (on Neutrosophic Theory and Applications), Volume VI

    Get PDF
    This sixth volume of Collected Papers includes 74 papers comprising 974 pages on (theoretic and applied) neutrosophics, written between 2015-2021 by the author alone or in collaboration with the following 121 co-authors from 19 countries: Mohamed Abdel-Basset, Abdel Nasser H. Zaied, Abduallah Gamal, Amir Abdullah, Firoz Ahmad, Nadeem Ahmad, Ahmad Yusuf Adhami, Ahmed Aboelfetouh, Ahmed Mostafa Khalil, Shariful Alam, W. Alharbi, Ali Hassan, Mumtaz Ali, Amira S. Ashour, Asmaa Atef, Assia Bakali, Ayoub Bahnasse, A. A. Azzam, Willem K.M. Brauers, Bui Cong Cuong, Fausto Cavallaro, Ahmet Çevik, Robby I. Chandra, Kalaivani Chandran, Victor Chang, Chang Su Kim, Jyotir Moy Chatterjee, Victor Christianto, Chunxin Bo, Mihaela Colhon, Shyamal Dalapati, Arindam Dey, Dunqian Cao, Fahad Alsharari, Faruk Karaaslan, Aleksandra Fedajev, Daniela Gîfu, Hina Gulzar, Haitham A. El-Ghareeb, Masooma Raza Hashmi, Hewayda El-Ghawalby, Hoang Viet Long, Le Hoang Son, F. Nirmala Irudayam, Branislav Ivanov, S. Jafari, Jeong Gon Lee, Milena Jevtić, Sudan Jha, Junhui Kim, Ilanthenral Kandasamy, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy, Darjan Karabašević, Songül Karabatak, Abdullah Kargın, M. Karthika, Ieva Meidute-Kavaliauskiene, Madad Khan, Majid Khan, Manju Khari, Kifayat Ullah, K. Kishore, Kul Hur, Santanu Kumar Patro, Prem Kumar Singh, Raghvendra Kumar, Tapan Kumar Roy, Malayalan Lathamaheswari, Luu Quoc Dat, T. Madhumathi, Tahir Mahmood, Mladjan Maksimovic, Gunasekaran Manogaran, Nivetha Martin, M. Kasi Mayan, Mai Mohamed, Mohamed Talea, Muhammad Akram, Muhammad Gulistan, Raja Muhammad Hashim, Muhammad Riaz, Muhammad Saeed, Rana Muhammad Zulqarnain, Nada A. Nabeeh, Deivanayagampillai Nagarajan, Xenia Negrea, Nguyen Xuan Thao, Jagan M. Obbineni, Angelo de Oliveira, M. Parimala, Gabrijela Popovic, Ishaani Priyadarshini, Yaser Saber, Mehmet Șahin, Said Broumi, A. A. Salama, M. Saleh, Ganeshsree Selvachandran, Dönüș Șengür, Shio Gai Quek, Songtao Shao, Dragiša Stanujkić, Surapati Pramanik, Swathi Sundari Sundaramoorthy, Mirela Teodorescu, Selçuk Topal, Muhammed Turhan, Alptekin Ulutaș, Luige Vlădăreanu, Victor Vlădăreanu, Ştefan Vlăduţescu, Dan Valeriu Voinea, Volkan Duran, Navneet Yadav, Yanhui Guo, Naveed Yaqoob, Yongquan Zhou, Young Bae Jun, Xiaohong Zhang, Xiao Long Xin, Edmundas Kazimieras Zavadskas

    Quantitative risk assessment, aggregation functions and capital allocation problems

    Get PDF
    [eng] This work is focused on the study of risk measures and solutions to capital allocation problems, their suitability to answer practical questions in the framework of insurance and financial institutions and their connection with a family of functions named aggregation operators. These operators are well-known among researchers from the information sciences or fuzzy sets and systems community. The first contribution of this dissertation is the introduction of GlueVaR risk measures, a family belonging to the more general class of distortion risk measures. GlueVaR risk measures are simple to understand for risk managers in the financial and insurance sectors, because they are based on the most popular risk measures (VaR and TVaR) in both industries. For the same reason, they are almost as easy to compute as those common risk measures and, moreover, GlueVaR risk measures allow to capture more intricated managerial and regulatory attitudes towards risk. The definition of the tail-subadditivity property for a pair of risks may be considered the second contribution. A distortion risk measure which satisfies this property has the ability to be subadditive in extremely adverse scenarios. In order to decide if a GlueVaR risk measure is a candidate to satisfy the tail-subadditivity property, conditions on its parameters are determined. It is shown that distortion risk measures and several ordered weighted averaging operators in the discrete finite case are mathematically linked by means of the Choquet integral. It is shown that the overall aggregation preference of the expert may be measured by means of the local degree of orness of the distortion risk measure, which is a concept taken over from the information sciences community and brung into the quantitative risk management one. New indicators for helping to characterize the discrete Choquet integral are also presented in this dissertation. The aim is complementing those already available, in order to be able to highlight particular features of this kind of aggregation function. Following this spirit, the degree of balance, the divergence, the variance indicator and Rényi entropies as indicators within the framework of the Choquet integral are here introduced. A major contribution derived from the relationship between distortion risk measures and aggregation operators is the characterization of the risk attitude implicit into the choice of a distortion risk measure and a confidence or tolerance level. It is pointed out that the risk attitude implicit in a distortion risk measure is to some extent contained in its distortion function. In order to describe some relevant features of the distortion function, the degree of orness indicator and a quotient function are used. It is shown that these mathematical devices give insights on the implicit risk behavior involved in risk measures and entail the definitions of overall, absolute and specific risk attitudes. Regarding capital allocation problems, a list of key elements to delimit these problems is provided and mainly two contributions are made. Firstly, it is shown that GlueVaR risk measures are as useful as other alternatives like VaR or TVaR to solve capital allocation problems. The second contribution is understanding capital allocation principles as compositional data. This interpretation of capital allocation principles allows the connection between aggregation operators and capital allocation problems, with an immediate practical application: Properly averaging several available solutions to the same capital allocation problem. This thesis contains some preliminary ideas on this connection, but it seems to be a promising research field.[spa] Este trabajo se centra en el estudio de medidas de riesgo y de soluciones a problemas de asignación de capital, en su capacidad para responder cuestiones prácticas en el ámbito de las instituciones aseguradoras y financieras, y en su conexión con una familia de funciones denominadas operadores de agregación. Estos operadores son bien conocidos entre los investigadores de las comunidades de las ciencias de la información o de los conjuntos y sistemas fuzzy. La primera contribución de esta tesis es la introducción de las medidas de riesgo GlueVaR, una familia que pertenece a la clase más general de las medidas de riesgo de distorsión. Las medidas de riesgo GlueVaR son sencillas de entender para los gestores de riesgo de los sectores financiero y asegurador, puesto que están basadas en las medidas de riesgo más populares (el VaR y el TVaR) de ambas industrias. Por el mismo motivo, son casi tan fáciles de calcular como estas medidas de riesgo más comunes pero, además, las medidas de riesgo GlueVaR permiten capturar actitudes de gestión y regulatorias ante el riesgo más complicadas. La definición de la propiedad de la subadditividad en colas para un par de riesgos se puede considerar la segunda contribución. Una medida de riesgo de distorsión que cumple esta propiedad tiene la capacidad de ser subadditiva en escenarios extremadamente adversos. Con el propósito de decidir si una medida de riesgo GlueVaR es candidata a satisfacer la propiedad de la subadditividad en colas se determinan condiciones sobre sus parámetros. Se muestra que las medidas de riesgo de distorsión y varios operadores de medias ponderadas ordenadas en el caso finito y discreto están matemáticamente relacionadas a través de la integral de Choquet. Se muestra que la preferencia global de agregación del experto puede medirse usando el nivel local de orness de la medida de riesgo de distorsión, que es un concepto trasladado des de la comunidad de las ciencias de la información hacia la comunidad de la gestión cuantitativa del riesgo. Nuevos indicadores para ayudar a caracterizar las integrales de Choquet en el caso discreto también se presentan en esta disertación. Se pretende complementar a los existentes, con el fin de ser capaces de destacar características particulares de este tipo de funciones de agregación. Con este espíritu, se presentan el nivel de balance, la divergencia, el indicador de varianza y las entropías de Rényi como indicadores en el ámbito de la integral de Choquet. Una contribución relevante que se deriva de la relación entre las medidas de riesgo de distorsión y los operadores de agregación es la caracterización de la actitud ante el riesgo implícita en la elección de una medida de riesgo de distorsión y de un nivel de confianza. Se señala que la actitud ante el riesgo implícita en una medida de riesgo de distorsión está contenida, hasta cierto punto, en su función de distorsión. Para describir algunos rasgos relevantes de la función de distorsión se usan el indicador nivel de orness y una función cociente. Se muestra que estos instrumentos matemáticos aportan información relativa al comportamiento ante el riesgo implícito en las medidas de riesgo, y que de ellos se derivan las definiciones de les actitudes ante el riego de tipo general, absoluto y específico. En cuanto a los problemas de asignación de capital, se proporciona un listado de elementos clave para delimitar estos problemas y se hacen principalmente dos contribuciones. En primer lugar, se muestra que las medidas de riesgo GlueVaR son tan útiles como otras alternativas tales como el VaR o el TVaR para resolver problemas de asignación de capital. La segunda contribución consiste en entender los principios de asignación de capital como datos composicionales. Esta interpretación de los principios de asignación de capital permite establecer conexión entre los operadores de agregación y los problemas de asignación de capital, con una aplicación práctica inmediata: calcular debidamente la media de diferentes soluciones disponibles para el mismo problema de asignación de capital. Esta tesis contiene algunas ideas preliminares sobre esta conexión, pero parece un campo de investigación prometedor

    Safety and Reliability - Safe Societies in a Changing World

    Get PDF
    The contributions cover a wide range of methodologies and application areas for safety and reliability that contribute to safe societies in a changing world. These methodologies and applications include: - foundations of risk and reliability assessment and management - mathematical methods in reliability and safety - risk assessment - risk management - system reliability - uncertainty analysis - digitalization and big data - prognostics and system health management - occupational safety - accident and incident modeling - maintenance modeling and applications - simulation for safety and reliability analysis - dynamic risk and barrier management - organizational factors and safety culture - human factors and human reliability - resilience engineering - structural reliability - natural hazards - security - economic analysis in risk managemen
    corecore