Fuzzy Logic in Decision Support: Methods, Applications and Future Trends

During the last decades, the art and science of fuzzy logic have witnessed significant developments and have found applications in many active areas, such as pattern recognition, classification, control systems, etc. A lot of research has demonstrated the ability of fuzzy logic in dealing with vague and uncertain linguistic information. For the purpose of representing human perception, fuzzy logic has been employed as an effective tool in intelligent decision making. Due to the emergence of various studies on fuzzy logic-based decision-making methods, it is necessary to make a comprehensive overview of published papers in this field and their applications. This paper covers a wide range of both theoretical and practical applications of fuzzy logic in decision making. It has been grouped into five parts: to explain the role of fuzzy logic in decision making, we first present some basic ideas underlying different types of fuzzy logic and the structure of the fuzzy logic system. Then, we make a review of evaluation methods, prediction methods, decision support algorithms, group decision-making methods based on fuzzy logic. Applications of these methods are further reviewed. Finally, some challenges and future trends are given from different perspectives. This paper illustrates that the combination of fuzzy logic and decision making method has an extensive research prospect. It can help researchers to identify the frontiers of fuzzy logic in the field of decision making

A Multi-objective Location Decision Making Model for Emergency Shelters Giving Priority to Subjective Evaluation of Residents

Earthquake is regarded as the most destructive and terrible disaster among all-natural disasters [1]. Experts agree that immediate emergency evacuation is the safest and most effective response to the earthquake disaster [2]. In the research of emergency evacuation planning, the influence of human subjectivity has gradually attracted researchers’ attention. In this paper, we take the human subjectivity as one of the most important factors for emergency evacuation planning. Based on the preferences of the residents at each demand point for the attributes of every candidate emergency shelter, the subjective score of each candidate emergency shelter is obtained. The preferences of residents will change with the refuge time, so do the weights of residents’ subjective scores of all attributes of candidate emergency shelters. Therefore, we use the subjective score function to describe the change of residents’ evaluations for the emergency shelter over time, and take the average value of subjective scores at all refuge times as the primary basis for location decision making. On these bases, we build a multi-objective location decision making model for emergency shelters giving priority to subjective evaluation of residents. In the model, we consider transfer distance, the efficiency of construction funds and the distribution of people among emergency shelters. Considering fairness, we minimize the standard deviation of the scores and the standard deviation of the transfer distances in the model. This model is applied to a case, which verifies its feasibility and shows that human subjectivity plays an important role in emergency evacuation planning

Advances in FUZZY techniques and applications: in occasion of Lofti Zadeh 100 birth anniversary

Advances in FUZZY techniques and applications: in occasion of Lotfi Zadeh 100 birth anniversary. Technological and Economic Development of Economy, 27(2), pp. 280-283

Granular computing and optimization model-based method for large-scale group decision-making and its application

In large-scale group decision-making process, some decision makers hesitate among several linguistic terms and cannot compare some alternatives, so they often express evaluation information with incomplete hesitant fuzzy linguistic preference relations. How to obtain suitable large-scale group decision-making results from incomplete preference information is an important and interesting issue to concern about. After analyzing the existing researches, we find that: i) the premise that complete preference relation is perfectly consistent is too strict, ii) deleting all incomplete linguistic preference relations that cannot be fully completed will lose valid assessment information, iii) semantics given by decision makers are greatly possible to be changed during the consistency improving process. In order to solve these issues, this work proposes a novel method based on Granular computing and optimization model for large-scale group decision-making, considering the original consistency of incomplete hesitant fuzzy linguistic preference relation and improving its consistency without changing semantics during the completion process. An illustrative example and simulation experiments demonstrate the rationality and advantages of the proposed method: i) semantics are not changed during the consistency improving process, ii) completion process does not significantly alter the inherent quality of information, iii) complete preference relations are globally consistent, iv) final large-scale group decision-making result is acquired by fusing complete preference relations with different weights

A double interaction-based financing group decisionmaking framework considering uncertain information and inconsistent assessment

Financing group decision-making (FGDM), which is an important stage of project financing, has unique characteristics: large investments and long payback horizons. Its evaluation results are likely to be distorted if we ignore the uncertain information and inconsistent assessment during the decision-making process. In this study, we propose a double interaction-based FGDM framework under uncertain information and inconsistent assessment. We modify the weight setting of evidence reasoning and aggregation method of probabilistic linguistic term sets to process the above two issues. The proposed framework is applied in a detailed case study analysis to display its effectiveness and stability. We expect the double interaction-based group decision-making framework under uncertain information and inconsistent assessment to be a useful tool to understand FGDM processes

A bibliometric analysis of Economic Research-Ekonomska Istrazivanja (2007–2019)

Economic Research-Ekonomska Istrazivanja is an international journal in the research field of business and economics and firstly published in 2007. In this paper, we make a bibliometric analysis of publications in Economic Research-Ekonomska Istrazivanja from 2007 to 2019. According to Web of Science (WoS), we derive 831 publications in the journal after data pre-processing. First, we explore characteristics of publications and citations based on widely recognised bibliometric indicators. Second, we present the influential countries/regions and influential institutions of publications in the journal. Next, we illustrate science mapping analysis according to two visualisation tools that are VOS viewer and CiteSpace. Specifically, co-citation networks and co-authorship networks are conducted to analyse connection of items. We generate bust detection analysis to identify the emerging cited authors and cited journals. Co-occurrence analysis and timeline view analysis of keywords are developed to detect the hot topics and trend of the journal. Finally, we make some discussions about future challenges of the journal in terms of the above analysis. This paper helps in objectively understanding the development of Economic Research-Ekonomska Istrazivanja and provides a valuable reference for the scholars in business and economics

A multi-channel cross-residual deep learning framework for news-oriented stock movement prediction

Stock market movement prediction remains challenging due to random walk characteristics. Yet through a potent blend of input parameters, a prediction model can learn sequential features more intelligently. In this paper, a multi-channel news-oriented prediction system is developed to capture intricate moving patterns of the stock market index. Specifically, the system adopts the temporal causal convolution to process historical index values due to its capability in learning long-term dependencies. Concurrently, it employs the Transformer Encoder for qualitative information extraction from financial news headlines and corresponding preview texts. A notable configuration to our multi-channel system is an integration of cross-residual learning between different channels, thereby allowing an earlier and closer information fusion. The proposed architecture is validated to be more efficient in trend forecasting compared to independent learning, by which channels are trained separately. Furthermore, we also demonstrate the effectiveness of involving news content previews, improving the prediction accuracy by as much as 3.39%

A hesitant fuzzy SMART method based on a new score function for information literacy assessment of teachers

As two powerful and flexible tools for decision-makers (DMs) to model the complex cognition, the hesitant fuzzy set (HFS) and hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (HFLTS) allow DMs to express their opinions with several possible membership values or linguistic terms on the objects over each criterion. The aim of this article is to develop a novel score function of the HFS and HFLTS including hesitant degree and fuzzy degree information. For this purpose, the notion of fuzzy degree of the hesitant fuzzy element (HFE) and hesitant fuzzy linguistic element (HFLE) is introduced first. Then, considering both the hesitant degree and fuzzy degree information in expressions, the new score function, namely the Score-H&FD, is designed. Based on which, we extend the classical SMART (simple multi-attribute rating technique) method to the hesitant fuzzy environment. As a result, the hesitant fuzzy SMART (HF-SMART) method is developed in this article. Afterwards, we apply our proposed approach to assess and rank several teachers concerning information literacy. Finally, sensitive analysis and comparative analysis are carried out. The results show that the proposed method in this article has substantial advantages and applicability

A probabilistic linguistic thermodynamic method based on the water-filling algorithm and regret theory for emergency decision making

Since thermodynamics can describe the energy of matter and its form of storage or transformation in the system, it is introduced to resolve the uncertain decision-making problems. The paper proposes the thermodynamic decision-making method which considers both the quantity and quality of the probabilistic linguistic decision information. The analogies for thermodynamical indicators: energy, exergy and entropy are developed under the probabilistic linguistic circumstance. The probabilistic linguistic thermodynamic method combines the regret theory which captures decision makers’ regret-aversion and the objective weight of criterion obtained by the water-filling algorithm. The proposed method is applied to select the optimal solution to respond to the floods in Chongqing, China. The self-comparison is conducted to verify the effectiveness of the objective weight obtained by the water-filling algorithm and regret theory in the probabilistic linguistic thermodynamic method. The reliability and feasibility of the proposed method are verified by comparative analysis with other decision-making methods by some simulation experiments and non-parametric tests