Engineering design is characterized by a high level of imprecision, vague parameters, and ill-defined relationships. In design, imprecision reduction must occur to arrive at a final product specification. Few design systems exist for adequately representing design imprecision, and formally reducing it to precise values. Fuzzy set theory has considerable potential for addressing the imprecision ...

For about 300 years, scientific language takes its distance in respect to ordinary language, just because the latter is no longer able to face the requirements of rigor and precision of the former. In these conditions, it could look strange to make of imprecision a goal of scientific investigation. The explanation of this paradox is that there is no precise definition of precision, while the di...

Engineering design is characterized by a high level of imprecision, vague parameters, and ill-defined relationships. In design, imprecision reduction must occur to arrive at a final product specification. Few design systems exist for adequately representing design imprecision, and formally reducing it to precise values. Fuzzy set theory has considerable potential for addressing the imprecision ...

The paper is devoted to the investigation of imprecision indices, introduced in [7]. They are used for evaluation of uncertainty (or more exactly imprecision), which is contained in information given by fuzzy (nonadditive) measures, in particular, by lower or upper probabilities. We argue that there exist various types of uncertainty, for example, randomness, investigated in probability theory,...

Methods for incorporating imprecision in engineering design decision-making are briefly reviewed and compared. A tutorial is presented on the Method of Imprecision (MoI), a formal method, based on the mathematics of fuzzy sets, for representing and manipulating imprecision in engineering design. The results of a design cost estimation example, utilizing a new informal cost specification, are pr...

In this paper, we try to shed some light on the relationship between imprecision in spatial reasoning systems and its impact on the complexity of the reasoning algorithms. Intuitively, reasoning about spatial descriptions should be easier if less precision is required. However, we claim that in general the introduction of imprecision does not improve the efficiency of the algorithms but rather ...

1 Context and the positive form Last week we discussed the dynamic analysis of the positive form of vague gradable adjectives developed by Barker (2002). Simplifying a bit, the analysis assigns the meaning in (1) to pos, where d is a function that maps a context and a measure function to a degree. (1) λgλxλc.g(x) d(c)(g) This analysis leads us to expect two kinds of contextual variability in th...

The paper is devoted to the investigation of imprecision indices, introduced in [8]. They are used for evaluating uncertainty (namely imprecision), which is contained in information, described by fuzzy (non-additive) measures, in particular, by lower and upper probabilities. We argue that there exist various types of uncertainty, for example, randomness, investigated in probability theory, impr...