Foreword-Special Issue on Uncertain Theory and Application: Recent Development

Abstract

Department of Risk Management and Insurance, Nankai University, Tianjin 30071, China * Corresponding Author, E-mail: lixiang@bjtu.edu.cn Real-world decision-making systems often exist numerous inherent and cognitive uncertainties. To handle these un-certainties, an efficient tool can be referred to as the probability theory if the size of sample data is sufficiently large. However, in reality, it is often difficult for a decision-maker to collect enough samples for the probability methodologies (even no-sample data). To efficiently handle this condition, Prof. Baoding Liu founded the uncertainty theory in 2007, in which uncertain variables and uncertain measure are defined as theoretical tools to describe and deal with uncertainties. As an important mathematical branch, up to now, uncertainty theory has been further developed by lots of researchers and successfully employed in a variety of real-world applications. In order to show the current state of uncertainty theory, this special issue intends to provide a platform to display the new developed researches in uncertainty theory and applications, such as management problems, economics, transportation problems, and so on. Due to great interests to this special issue from a lot of researchers, a total of 20 papers have been received after we announced the Call-for-Paper in August, 2012. All these papers focus on investigating the theory and applications in the framework of uncertainty theory. After a rigorous review process, 8 papers are finally accepted to be published in this special issue. The paper by Xiaowei Chen and Jinwu Gao investigated some mathematical properties of uncertain differ-ential equations. With the stability concepts, some sufficient and necessary conditions with respect to stability are proved for linear uncertain differential equations. The paper by Xiang Zhang