Methods For Decision Making In An Uncertain Environment Proceedings Of The Xvii Sigef Congress

This book contains a selection of the papers presented at the XVII SIGEF Congress. It presents fuzzy logic, neural networks and other intelligent techniques applied to economic and business problems. This book is very useful for researchers and graduate students aiming to introduce themselves to the field of quantitative techniques for overcoming uncertain environments. The contributors are experienced scholars of different countries who offer real world applications of these mathematical techniques./a

This book contains a selection of the papers presented at the XVII SIGEF Congress. It presents fuzzy logic, neural networks and other intelligent techniques applied to economic and business problems. This book is very useful for researchers and graduate students aiming to introduce themselves to the field of quantitative techniques for overcoming uncertain environments. The contributors are experienced scholars of different countries who offer real world applications of these mathematical techniques.

This book is a collection of selected papers presented at the SIGEF conference, held at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Girona (Spain), 06-08 July, 2015. This edition of the conference has been presented with the slogan “Scientific methods for the treatment of uncertainty in social sciences”. There are different ways for dealing with uncertainty in management. The book focuses on soft computing theories and their role in assessing uncertainty in a complex world. It gives a comprehensive overview of quantitative management topics and discusses some of the most recent developments in all the areas of business and management in soft computing including Decision Making, Expert Systems and Forgotten Effects Theory, Forecasting Models, Fuzzy Logic and Fuzzy Sets, Modelling and Simulation Techniques, Neural Networks and Genetic Algorithms and Optimization and Control. The book might be of great interest for anyone working in the area of management and business economics and might be especially useful for scientists and graduate students doing research in these fields.

1. The increasing number of research papers appeared in the last years that either make use of aggregation functions or contribute to its theoretieal study asses its growing importance in the field of Fuzzy Logie and in others where uncertainty and imprecision play a relevant role. Since these papers are pub lished in many journals, few books and several proceedings of conferences, books on aggregation are partieularly welcome. To my knowledge, "Agrega tion Operators. New Trends and Applications" is the first book aiming at generality , and I take it as a honour to write this Foreword in response to the gentle demand of its editors, Radko Mesiar, Tomasa Calvo and Gaspar Mayor. My pleasure also derives from the fact that twenty years aga I was one of the first Spaniards interested in the study of aggregation functions, and this book includes work by several Spanish authors. The book contains nice and relevant original papers, authored by some of the most outstanding researchers in the field, and since it can serve, as the editors point out in the Preface, as a small handbook on aggregation, the book is very useful for those entering the subject for the first time. The book also contains apart dealing with potential areas of application, so it can be helpful in gaining insight on the future developments.

The notion of Fuzziness stands as one of the really new concepts that have recently enriched the world of Science. Science grows not only through technical and formal advances on one side and useful applications on the other side, but also as consequence of the introduction and assimilation of new concepts in its corpus. These, in turn, produce new developments and applications. And this is what Fuzziness, one of the few new concepts arisen in the XX Century, has been doing so far. This book aims at paying homage to Professor Lotfi A. Zadeh, the “father of fuzzy logic” and also at giving credit to his exceptional work and personality. In a way, this is reflected in the variety of contributions collected in the book. In some of them the authors chose to speak of personal meetings with Lotfi; in others, they discussed how certain papers of Zadeh were able to open for them a new research horizon. Some contributions documented results obtained from the author/s after taking inspiration from a particular idea of Zadeh, thus implicitly acknowledging him. Finally, there are contributions of several “third generation fuzzysists or softies” who were firstly led into the world of Fuzziness by a disciple of Lotfi Zadeh, who, following his example, took care of opening for them a new road in science. Rudolf Seising is Adjoint Researcher at the European Centre for Soft Computing in Mieres, Asturias (Spain). Enric Trillas and Claudio Moraga are Emeritus Researchers at the European Centre for Soft Computing, Mieres, Asturias (Spain). Settimo Termini is Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Palermo, Italy and Affiliated Researcher at the European Centre for Soft Computing, Mieres, Asturias (Spain)

Results-based management (RBM) is a public management strategy that involves decision making based on reliable information regarding the effects of governmental actions on society. It has been adopted in various developed countries as a way of improving efficiency and effectiveness in public policy. In Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries, governments and public managers show increasing interest in this management strategy. Given the relative novelty of RBM in the region, however, there is scant literature on the subject. This book is intended to fill this gap in two ways. First, it seeks to describe some of the basic RBM concepts and adapt them according to regional characteristics. Second, it presents an assessment, based on studies carried out in 25 countries, of the challenges facing LAC countries and their capacity to implement results-based public management.