Foreword to the special issue of journal of intelligent manufacturing on uncertain models in intelligent manufacturing systems: dedicated to professor Mistuo Gen for his 70th birthday

Abstract

It is a real pleasure and honor for us towrite this preface to the special issue of Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing (JIM), which focuses on “UncertainModels in IntelligentManufacturing Systems”. The special issue is comprised of excellent papers selected from IMS2014 conference and marked as a gift in honor and celebration of the 70th birthday of Professor Mitsuo Gen. Real decisions are usually made in the state of indeterminacy, including randomness and uncertainty. There exist two mathematical systems for modeling indeterminacy. One is probability theory (Kolmogorov 1933)which is the branch of mathematics concerned with probability (interpreted as frequency) and the analysis of random phenomena. The other is uncertainty theory (Liu 2007) which is the branch of mathematics concerned with uncertainty (interpreted as personal belief degree) and the analysis of uncertain phenomena. Real-world manufacturing systems involve various uncertain factors. In order to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the manufacturing system in an uncertain environment, we are usually employing various uncertain programming and artificial intelligent techniques. Then we can implement decision support systems or knowledge-based systems by combining the computational results based on mathematical programming or artificial intelligence to simulate, optimize and manage an intelligent manufacturing sys-