Bernd Möller and Michael Beer (2004)
Fuzzy Randomness - Uncertainty in Civil Engineering and Computational Mechanics
Springer, Berlin Heidelberg New York.
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.