Decision Making and Optimization

The book is a benefit for graduate and postgraduate students in the areas of operations research, decision theory, optimization theory, linear algebra, interval analysis and fuzzy sets. The book will also be useful for the researchers in the respective areas. 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.

Prof. Martin Gavalec, Ph.D. is a professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Hradec Kralove, Faculty of Informatics and Management, Czech Republic. His professional interests include non-standard optimization methods based on the maximum operation, in combination with further ones, such as the minimum or the fuzzy triangular norm operations. He is an author and co-author of 3 books in English and more than 45 papers listed in WoS.
Prof. Jaroslav Ramik, Ph.D. is a professor of Mathematics, Statistics and Operations Research at the Silesian University Opava, School of Business Karvina, Czech Republic. He is a head of Department of Mathematical methods in Economics. His professional interests include optimization methods in economics and decision making. He is an author of 6 books in English and more than 50 papers listed in WoS. He is active in the Czech Society for Operations Research where he served as a former president of the Society in two time periods.
Prof. Karel Zimmermann, D.Sc. is a professor of mathematics and operations research at the Faculty of mathematics and physics, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. His professional interests include optimization methods in economics. He is an author of 5 books in English and more than 40 papers listed in WoS.