Complexity Management in Fuzzy Systems : A Rule Base Compression Approach

Doing research is a great adventure As any adventure sometimes it is hard You may feel alone and with no idea where to go But if you have courage and press onwards You will eventually stand where no one has stood And see the world as no one has seen it There can be no better feeling than this! Adaptation from ‘Introduction to Research’, Tom Addis (2004) The idea about this book has been on the author’s mind for almost a decade but it was only about a couple of years ago when the underlying research process was actually started. The reason for this delay has been the insufficient spare time for research being a lecturer in a ‘new’ UK university where the emphasis is mainly on teaching. And maybe this book would have never been written if the author had not been presented with the chance of developing new teaching modules in fuzzy logic that have given him food for thought in a research related context and have helped him combine efficiently his teaching and research activities. The title of this book may sound too specialised but it has a much wider meaning. Fuzzy systems are any systems for modelling, simulation, control, prediction, diagnosis, decision making, pattern recognition, image processing, etc. which use fuzzy logic. Although fuzzy logic is an advanced extension of binary logic, the latter is still used predominantly today.