Decision Making and Optimization : Special Matrices and Their Applications in Economics and Management
Abstract
The first part of the book deals with decision making problems and procedures that have been established to combine opinions about alternatives related to different points of view. Procedures based on pairwise comparisons are thoroughly investigated.
In the second part we investigate optimization problems where objective functions and constraints are characterized by extremal operators such as maximum, minimum or various triangular norms (t-norms). Matrices in max-min algebra are useful in applications such as automata theory, design of switching circuits, logic of binary relations, medical diagnosis, Markov chains, social choice, models of organizations, information systems, political systems and clustering.
The input data in real problems are usually not exact and can be characterized by interval values.