Overview

Industrial Engineering (IE) is concerned with the design, improvement, and installation of integrated systems of people, material, equipment, and energy. Industrial engineers face many problems with incomplete and vague information in these systems since the characteristics of these problems often require this kind of information. Fuzzy sets approaches are usually most appropriate when human evaluations and the modeling of human knowledge are needed. IE brings a significant number of applications of fuzzy set theory. After an introductory chapter explaining the recent status of fuzzy sets in IE, this volume involves application chapters on the major seven areas of IE to which fuzzy set theory can contribute. These major application areas are Control and Reliability, Engineering Economics and Investment Analysis, Group and Multi-criteria Decision-making, Human Factors Engineering and Ergonomics, Manufacturing Systems and Technology Management, Optimization Techniques, and Statistical Decision-making. Under these major areas, every chapter includes didactic numerical applications. The authorsAmong many authors in this book, some examples are H.-J. Zimmermann, Janusz Kacprzyk, Hideo Tanaka, Waldemar Karwowski, F. Herrera, C. Kolski, P. Paul Wang, E. Herrera-Viedma, Hung T. Nguyen, Vladik Kreinovich, Jose L. Verdegay, Tomoe Entani, Nikos Tsourveloudis, F. Jimenez.