Introduction To Interval Computation

This book is revised and expanded version of the original German text. The arrangement of the material and the structure are essentially unchanged. All remarks in the Preface to the German Edition regarding naming conventions for formulas, theorems, lemmas, and definitions are still valid as are those concerning the arrangement and choice of material.

This book is revised and expanded version of the original German text. The arrangement of the material and the structure are essentially unchanged. All remarks in the Preface to the German Edition regarding naming conventions for formulas, theorems, lemmas, and definitions are still valid as are those concerning the arrangement and choice of material.

An update on the author's previous books, this introduction to interval analysis provides an introduction to INTLAB, a high-quality, comprehensive MATLAB toolbox for interval computations, making this the first interval analysis book that does with INTLAB what general numerical analysis texts do with MATLAB.

Scientists are, all the time, in a struggle with uncertainty which is always a threat to a trustworthy scientific knowledge. A very simple and natural idea, to defeat uncertainty, is that of enclosing uncertain measured values in real closed intervals. On the basis of this idea, interval arithmetic is constructed. The idea of calculating with intervals is not completely new in mathematics: the concept has been known since Archimedes, who used guaranteed lower and upper bounds to compute his constant Pi. Interval arithmetic is now a broad field in which rigorous mathematics is associated with scientific computing. This connection makes it possible to solve uncertainty problems that cannot be efficiently solved by floating-point arithmetic. Today, application areas of interval methods include electrical engineering, control theory, remote sensing, experimental and computational physics, chaotic systems, celestial mechanics, signal processing, computer graphics, robotics, and computer-assisted proofs. The purpose of this book is to be a concise but informative introduction to the theories of interval arithmetic as well as to some of their computational and scientific applications. Editorial Reviews "This new book by Hend Dawood is a fresh introduction to some of the basics of interval computation. It stops short of discussing the more complicated subdivision methods for converging to ranges of values, however it provides a bit of perspective about complex interval arithmetic, constraint intervals, and modal intervals, and it does go into the design of hardware operations for interval arithmetic, which is something still to be done by computer manufacturers." - Ramon E. Moore, (The Founder of Interval Computations) Professor Emeritus of Computer and Information Science, Department of Mathematics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, U.S.A. "A popular math-oriented introduction to interval computations and its applications. This short book contains an explanation of the need for interval computations, a brief history of interval computations, and main interval computation techniques. It also provides an impressive list of main practical applications of interval techniques." - Vladik Kreinovich, (International Journal of Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-Based Systems) Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, Texas, U.S.A. "I am delighted to see one more Egyptian citizen re-entering the field of interval mathematics invented in this very country thousands years ago." - Marek W. Gutowski, Institute of Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warszawa, Poland

Papers from a February 1994 international workshop held in El Paso, Texas, survey industrial applications of numerical analysis with automatic result verification, and of interval representation of data. After an introductory chapter explaining the content of the papers in terminology accessible to mathematically literate graduate students, chapters describe applications such as economic input-output models; quality control in manufacturing design; and medical expert systems, focusing on dealing with problems such as overestimation. Other topics include branch and bound algorithms for global optimization; fuzzy logic; and constraint propagation. For students and researchers interested in automatic result verification. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Targeted audience • Specialists in numerical computations, especially in numerical optimiza tion, who are interested in designing algorithms with automatie result ver ification, and who would therefore be interested in knowing how general their algorithms caIi in principle be. • Mathematicians and computer scientists who are interested in the theory 0/ computing and computational complexity, especially computational com plexity of numerical computations. • Students in applied mathematics and computer science who are interested in computational complexity of different numerical methods and in learning general techniques for estimating this computational complexity. The book is written with all explanations and definitions added, so that it can be used as a graduate level textbook. What this book .is about Data processing. In many real-life situations, we are interested in the value of a physical quantity y that is diflicult (or even impossible) to measure directly. For example, it is impossible to directly measure the amount of oil in an oil field or a distance to a star. Since we cannot measure such quantities directly, we measure them indirectly, by measuring some other quantities Xi and using the known relation between y and Xi'S to reconstruct y. The algorithm that transforms the results Xi of measuring Xi into an estimate fj for y is called data processing.

At the core of many engineering problems is the solution of sets of equa tions and inequalities, and the optimization of cost functions. Unfortunately, except in special cases, such as when a set of equations is linear in its un knowns or when a convex cost function has to be minimized under convex constraints, the results obtained by conventional numerical methods are only local and cannot be guaranteed. This means, for example, that the actual global minimum of a cost function may not be reached, or that some global minimizers of this cost function may escape detection. By contrast, interval analysis makes it possible to obtain guaranteed approximations of the set of all the actual solutions of the problem being considered. This, together with the lack of books presenting interval techniques in such a way that they could become part of any engineering numerical tool kit, motivated the writing of this book. The adventure started in 1991 with the preparation by Luc Jaulin of his PhD thesis, under Eric Walter's supervision. It continued with their joint supervision of Olivier Didrit's and Michel Kieffer's PhD theses. More than two years ago, when we presented our book project to Springer, we naively thought that redaction would be a simple matter, given what had already been achieved . . .