Studies in Systems, Decision and Control

On various examples ranging from geosciences to environmental sciences, this

book explains how to generate an adequate description of uncertainty, how to justify

semiheuristic algorithms for processing uncertainty, and how to make these algorithms

more computationally efficient. It explains in what sense the existing approach to

uncertainty as a combination of random and systematic components is only an

approximation, presents a more adequate three-component model with an additional

periodic error component, and explains how uncertainty propagation techniques can

be extended to this model. The book provides a justification for a practically efficient

heuristic technique (based on fuzzy decision-making). It explains how the computational

complexity of uncertainty processing can be reduced. The book also shows how to

take into account that in real life, the information about uncertainty is often only

partially known, and, on several practical examples, explains how to extract the missing

information about uncertainty from the available data.