Overview

1.1 Introduction This book is written in five major divisions. The first part is the introduc- tory chapters consisting of Chapters 1-3. In part two, Chapters 4-10, we use fuzzy probabilities to model a fuzzy queuing system . We switch to employ- ing fuzzy arrival rates and fuzzy service rates to model the fuzzy queuing system in part three in Chapters 11 and 12. Optimization models comprise part four in Chapters 13-17. The final part has a brief summary and sug- gestions for future research in Chapter 18, and a summary of our numerical methods for calculating fuzzy probabilities, values of objective functions in fuzzy optimization, etc., is in Chapter 19. First we need to be familiar with fuzzy sets. All you need to know about fuzzy sets for this book comprises Chapter 2. Two other items relating to fuzzy sets, needed in Chapters 13-17, are also in Chapter 2: (1) how we plan to handle the maximum/minimum of a fuzzy set; and (2) how we will rank a finite collection of fuzzy numbers from smallest to largest.