Fuzzy Randomness: Uncertainty in Civil Engineering and Computational Mechanics

The subject of the book is the comprehensive consideration of uncertainty in the numerical analysis, the safety assessment, and the design of structures. Stochastic as well as non-stochastic uncertainty is treated on the basis of the superordinated uncertainty model fuzzy randomness. This new uncertainty model contains the special cases of real valued random variables and fuzzy variables and permits to take account of both uncertainty characteristics simultaneously. The book introduces to the problem of uncertainty and provides a current survey of relevant uncertainty models and their application in civil engineering. The necessary, special mathematical basics of the fuzzy set theory and the theory of fuzzy random variables are explained in an engineering manner and illustrated by way of examples. Basic ideas and methods for appropriately quantifying uncertain structural parameters are presented and demonstrated by means of characteristic examples. For processing uncertainty in structural analysis, safety assessment, and structural design completely new algorithms are introduced and described in detail as fuzzy structural analysis, fuzzy probabilistic safety assessment, and fuzzy cluster design. The application of the new methods is demonstrated for selected examples from civil engineering, their essential advantages are emphasized. For the first time this represents a coherent, overall concept for considering uncertainty in civil engineering. The book in particular addresses to civil engineers and requires a university degree as well as basic knowledge in stochastics. But also for mechanical engineers, colleagues from applied mathematics, and other people who are interested in uncertainty problems the book represents a suitable introduction to the problem of uncertainty modeling and provides general solutions and algorithms, which may also be applied to problems from other fields beyond engineering.

Table of Contents:
1 Introduction.- 2 Mathematical Basics for the Formal Description of Uncertainty.- 3 Description of Uncertain Structural Parameters as Fuzzy Variables.- 4 Description of Uncertain Structural Parameters as Fuzzy Random Variables.- 5 Fuzzy and Fuzzy Stochastic Structural Analysis.- 6 Fuzzy Probabilistic Safety Assessment.- 7 Structural Design Based on Clustering.- References.

Review :
From the reviews: "The subject of the book is the comprehensive consideration of uncertainty in the numerical analysis, the safety assessment, and the design of structures. ... The book in particular is addressed to civil engineers ... . But also for mechanical engineers ... the book represents a suitable introduction to the problem of uncertainty modeling ... . can be instrumental in broadening the interests and background of those who turn to it. The book demonstrates how one goes about taking account of uncertainty modeling and uncertainty models." (Current Engineering Practice - online, Vol. 47, 2004/2005) "The book deals with a new and important subject of mathematical modeling in engineering, i.e. uncertainty models in civil engineering. It contains seven chapters and an extensive reference list. This work is recommended to engineers and scientists in the area of civil engineering, fuzzy analysis and the corresponding numerical methods." (Olivian Simionescu, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1080, 2006) "To my best knowledge, this is the first book that covers fuzzy randomness in a comprehensive way. The motivation of the authors to study fuzzy randomness was to deal with some difficult problems in the field of civil engineering and computational mechanics in a more realistic fashion. ... this is an important book. I have no doubt that it will stimulate the use of fuzzy randomness not only in civil engineering and computational mechanics, but in other areas as well." (George J. Klir, International Journal of General Systems, Vol. 34 (3), 2005)