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1.0. INTRODUCTION:
It has increasingly been recognized that our society is undergoing a significant transformation,
usually described as a transition from an “Industrial to an Information Society”.
In this span of transformation, one way of simplifying a very complex system perhaps the most
significant one – is to allow some degree of uncertainty in its description. It is entails an
appropriate aggregation or summary of the various entities within the system. Statement
obtained from this simplified system are less precise, but their relevance to the original system is
fully maintained. That information loss that is necessary for reducing the complexity of the
system to a manageable level is expressed in UNCERTAINTY. The concept of Uncertainty is
thus connected with both complexity of information 1
Thus, complexity and information are closely interrelated. During this course of time, the
realization of Uncertainty, vagueness and ambiguity in the world has led to the concept of
fuzziness.
Uncertainty – it’s the state of being uncertain, something that you cannot be sure
That. Where as, our statistics & probabilistic approaches deal with
uncertainty.
Ambiguity – it’s the state of having more than one possible meaning.
Hence, due to these constraints; the idea of fuzzy sets was born in 1964, and in 1965 Lofti A.
Jadeh a well respected professor in the department of Electrical Engineering & computer
science at university of California presented a paper on FUZZY SETS 2.
This made to the development of new mathematical formulation called the FUZZY
CONCEPTS by himself (Jadeh) & and his followers.
In the last 3 decades, significant progress has been made in the development of Fuzzy sets
and Fuzzy logic theory in Engineering, Natural and socio-economic science.
The successful applications of fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic can be attributed to the fact that the
fuzzy theory reflects the true situation of the real world, where human thinking is dominated
by approximate reasoning logic.
* For example, during the design stage, decision making is mainly based on conceptual
understanding. Unfortunately, such information is usually vaguely defined by the experts.
Therefore, consideration of imprecise and vague information becomes an important issue in
an automated design environment.*
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2.0. Application to Civil Engineering tiled
Engineering field acts as platform for the application of fuzzy concepts. We know that
Civil Engineering field is fundamentally different from other disciplines. It means that
the theories never fully satisfy the problem considered. This is because, the civil
engineering project is complex and usually large in nature: hence, there will be almost
no chance to test the prototype compared to other disciplines. As result, there is
uncertainty in application of theoretical solutions. More over, our engineering problems
are constraint satisfaction problems.
Example: when we trying to determine the best frame design for a building, one may be
constrained by design codes as well as by the design specifications such as functional,
architectural and structural behavior requirements. Once these constraints are satisfied
the remaining problem may be to find and design that requires the least construction
material. These, constraints mush be strictly satisfied without disregarding them.
There by, these complexities, uncertainties and vagueness in decision making in real
structure provide the main motivation for the use of fuzzy concepts. Its proven by the
experts that the fuzzy concept is a useful tool and can be effectively applied for the
problems in civil engineering in order to arrive at the optimal solution.
During the last decade there has been a growing interest in the application of these
concepts to engineering problems. Fuzzy concepts provide an easy way of dealing with
complex problems, because it can be built with fuzzy models containing vagueness and
impreciseness in knowledge representation. Hence, it is suited for applications where
the ability to model real world design problem in precise mathematical form is difficult.
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Construction field
- for management problems like construction scheduling of the project
[ S.S. Leu et al. (1999)]
- for planning of life cycle of project problems like selection of best
construction equipment.*
[V.S.S. Kumar et al. (2004)]
Traffic engineering
- for automatic control of traffic signals based on fuzzy stochastic model
[George J. Klir et al.]
Reliability of structures
- for damage assessment in structures [W. Chiang et al. (2000)]
Metal structures
- for predicting fatigue & Creep characteristics [J. Harris (2001)]
Fuzzy concepts thrown its wide variety of application for the field of civil engineering.
Hence, we the engineers should explore it for its potential application for the problems we
face in this engineering world.
Where:
C- an arbitrary crisp set
X – an element in the set
U – membership function
Limitation:
It has sharp boundary between members of the set and those not in the set.
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3.11 Classical set operations:
There are three basic set operations
Where:
U is a universe discourse
A & B are sets inU.
1. Commulative law
2. Associative law
3. distributive law
4. Law of Double complementation
5. Demorgan’s law
6. Law of Excluded middle
7. Law of Contradiction
8. Law of Tautology
9. Law of Absorption
The membership represents a certain degree of belonging of the object in the fuzzy
set. The transition from belong to not belonging is gradual, which gives one some
means of handling vagueness. Fuzzy sets thus overcome a major weakness of crisp
sets.
i.e, Fuzzy sets do not have an arbitrarily established boundary to separate the
members from nonmembers. Thus in a fuzzy set membership function can be
represented as:
The discussion on classical set and fuzzy set can be represented graphically:
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In which triangles and trapezoid membership functions are more frequently used.
Example: Figure shows the result of using min. to form the intersection of two fuzzy
sets is:
Example: Figure shows the result of using max. to form the union of two fuzzy sets
as;
3. A complement of fuzzy set A defined by the difference between one and the
membership degree in A.
It should be noted that the range of membership degree is restricted to the set {0, 1}.
We know that fuzzy concept generalizes the black & white concept, by varying the
membership to allow “gray areas”, it has to violate two fundamental laws of set
theory.
i.e, Law of excluded middle
& the law of contradiction
In other words, it is possible for an element to partially belong to both fuzzy set and
sets complement. …6
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Example: Mr. X is a person belongs to the set of bald people to degree 0.2.
i.e, μ bald (X) = 0.2
Based on the definition of complement operator, Mr. X belongs to the
complement of bald people to degree 0.8.
i.e, μbald (X) = 0.8
The person partially belongs to the set of bald people as well as the set of
people who are not bald.
In fuzzy theory any element partially belonging to fuzzy set, is also partially
member of its complement.
Hence, we can say that law of excluded middle & law of contradiction are not
axioms of fuzzy theory.
3.2.5. Hedges:
A hedge is a modifier to a fuzzy set. It modifies the meaning of the original set
to create a compound fuzzy set.
Very & more or less are two commonly used hedges. Their definitions are
listed below.
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In order to quality as an aggregation function “h” must satisfy at least the
following two axiomatic requirements, which express the essence of the notion
of the aggregation.
Axiom 1: If h = {0, 0, -------0} = 0
and h = { 1, 1, ------1} = 1 as boundary conditions.
i.e, ‘h’ is monotonic nondecreasing in all its arguments the other two additional
axioms which we commonly use are:
i.e,
If the above statement is violated, then such a fuzzy set is a nonconvex fuzzy
set.
The value ‘ ‘ can be chosen arbittrarity but is often designated at the values of
the membership grades appearing in the fuzzy set under consideration.
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Example: consider the concept “moderately approved” regarding the public
opinion of a presidential candidate. The universe of discourse is the % of those
people supporting the candidate in a poll
Let U = [ 0%, 10%, 20%......... 100%]
The membership function of a fuzzy set
For example, if the variable is linguistic one say “site conditions” which can
take the values of excellent, fair, poor, etc. The fuformation expressed in words
or phrases in this example has a value but it is not clearly defined. These
values scan be made susceptible to meaningful classifications.
Jadeh considered these values as fuzzy sets.
i.e, U = {site conditions}
This universal set consists the sub sets as
U = {excellent, fair, poor}
In which membership values may be given for the subsets considering their
ranges.
In the manner, fuzzy sets can well be considered for quantifying qualitative
factors.
If the Degree of belief in a fuzzy set is say getting narrowed, then the linguistic
variables can be described as say very excellent, very fair, very poor, etc.
This can be represented graphically as;
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NOTE: The interpretation of fuzzy linguistic terms has been clearly given by
Jadh [Fuzzy sets and applications (1984)]
Fuzzy rules take the form. If (conditions or inteceden) and THEN (actions or
consequent). Where conditions ad actions are linguistic labels applied to input
and output variables, respectively.
A set of such fuzzy rules conciliates the Fuzzy rule as of FLC. The system
uses this rule base to produce precise output values according to the input
values.