Consensus Under Fuzziness

We live, unfortunately, in turbulent and difficult times plagued by various political, economic, and social problems, as well as by natural disasters worldwide. Systems become more and more complicated, and this concerns all levels, exemplified first by global political alliances, groups of countries, regions, etc., and secondly, by multinational (global) corporations and companies of all sizes. These same concerns affect all social groups. This all makes decision processes very complicated. In virtually all decision processes in these complicated systems, there are various actors (decision makers) who represent individual subjects (persons, countries, companies, etc.) and their respective interest groups. To reach a meaningful (good) decision, opinions of all such actors must be taken into account or a given decision may be rejected and not implemented. Ideally, a decision would be made after a consensus between the parties involved had been attained. So, consensus is a very desirable situation. In most real-world cases there is considerable uncertainty concerning all aspects of the decision making process. Moreover, opinions, goals, constraints, etc. are usually imprecisely known. This makes the decision making process difficult as one cannot employ conventional "hard" tools.

This book is intended for researchers and postgraduates who are interested in the consensus reaching process in group decision-making problems. It puts forward new optimization-based decision support approaches to help decision-makers find roadmaps to consensus with minimum adjustments. Simulation experiments and comparison analysis are subsequently conducted to assess the validity of the proposal. After reading this book, readers will possess a number of valuable tools for building consensus with minimum adjustments in the context of group decision-making. Further, the proposed approach can effectively reduce costs in consensus building.​

This book offers a concise introduction and comprehensive overview of the state of the art in the field of decision-making and consensus modeling, with a special emphasis on fuzzy methods. It consists of a collection of authoritative contributions reporting on the decision-making process from different perspectives: from psychology to social and political sciences, from decision sciences to data mining, and from computational sciences in general, to artificial and computational intelligence and systems. Written as a homage to Mario Fedrizzi for his scholarly achievements, creative ideas and long lasting services to different scientific communities, it introduces key theoretical concepts, describes new models and methods, and discusses a range of promising real-world applications in the field of decision-making science. It is a timely reference guide and a source of inspiration for advanced students and researchers

The book introduces readers to some of the latest advances in and approaches to decision-making methods based on thermodynamic characters and hesitant fuzzy linguistic preference relations. By investigating the decision-making methods with thermodynamic parameters based on different information representatives, the book offers readers a novel perspective for solving problems under uncertainty. By exploring the consistency and consensus of hesitant fuzzy linguistic preference relations, the book gives readers efficient ways for preference analysis under uncertainty, chiefly intended for researchers and practitioners working in operations research, multi-attribute decision making, preference analysis, etc. The book can also be used as supplementary material for postgraduate and senior-year undergraduate students of the relevant professional institutions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th Dortmund Fuzzy Days, Dortmund, Germany, 2006. This conference has established itself as an international forum for the discussion of new results in the field of Computational Intelligence. The papers presented here, all thoroughly reviewed, are devoted to foundational and practical issues in fuzzy systems, neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, and machine learning and thus cover the whole range of computational intelligence.

This book is a collection of contributions written by philosophers and scientists active in different fields, such as mathematics, logics, social sciences, computer sciences and linguistics. They comment on and discuss various parts of and subjects and propositions introduced in the Handbook of Analytical Philosophy of Medicine from Kadem Sadegh-Zadeh, published by Springer in 2012. This volume reports on the fruitful exchange and debate that arose in the fuzzy community upon the publication of the Handbook. This was not only very much appreciated by the community but also seen as a critical starting point for beginning a new discussion. The results of this discussion, which involved many different perspectives from science and the humanities and was warmly encouraged by Kadem Sadegh-Zadeh himself, are accurately reported in this volume, which is intended to be a critical companion to Kadem Sadegh-Zadeh ́s handbook. Rudolf Seising is currently an adjunct researcher at the European Centre for Soft Computing in Mieres, Asturias (Spain) and a college lecturer at the Faculty of History and Arts, at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich (Germany). Marco Elio Tabacchi is currently the Scientific Director of the Italian National Research & Survey Organization Demopolis, and a research assistant in the Soft Computing Group at University of Palermo (Italy).

Nowadays, decision problems are pervaded with incomplete knowledge, i.e., imprecision and/or uncertain information, both in the problem description and in the preferential information. In this volume leading scientists in the field address various theoretical and practical aspects related to the handling of this incompleteness. The problems discussed are taken from multi-objective linear programming, rationality considerations in preference modelling, non-probabilistic utility theory, data fusion, group decision making and multicriteria decision aid. The book is oriented towards researchers, graduate and postgraduate students in decision analysis, fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic, and operations research/management science.

Each individual investor is different, with different financial goals, levels of risk tolerance and personal preferences. From the point of view of investment management, these characteristics are often defined as objectives and constraints