The purpose of this book is to present an up to date account of fuzzy ideals of a semiring. The book concentrates on theoretical aspects and consists of eleven chapters including three invited chapters. Among the invited chapters, two are devoted to applications of Semirings to automata theory, and one deals with some generalizations of Semirings. This volume may serve as a useful hand book for graduate students and researchers in the areas of Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science.

The purpose of this book is to present an up to date account of fuzzy ideals of a semiring. The book concentrates on theoretical aspects and consists of eleven chapters including three invited chapters. Among the invited chapters, two are devoted to applications of Semirings to automata theory, and one deals with some generalizations of Semirings. This volume may serve as a useful hand book for graduate students and researchers in the areas of Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science.

This book includes results of the seventh International Conference on Fuzzy Information and Engineering (ICFIE'2014) and the 1st International Conference of Operations Research and Management (ICORM'2014) on November 7-11, 2014 in ZhuHai, China. The book, contains 35 selected high-quality papers, and is divided into five main parts: Part I focuses on ``Fuzzy Systems and Its Applications", Part II on ``Fuzzy Mathematics and Its Applications", Part III discusses ``Fuzzy Information and Computer", Part IV is devoted to ``Operations Research and Management and Its Applications" and Part V includes various other topics.

This volume presents a short guide to the extensive literature concerning semir ings along with a complete bibliography. The literature has been created over many years, in variety of languages, by authors representing different schools of mathematics and working in various related fields. In many instances the terminology used is not universal, which further compounds the difficulty of locating pertinent sources even in this age of the Internet and electronic dis semination of research results. So far there has been no single reference that could guide the interested scholar or student to the relevant publications. This book is an attempt to fill this gap. My interest in the theory of semirings began in the early sixties, when to gether with Bogdan W ~glorz I tried to investigate some algebraic aspects of compactifications of topological spaces, semirings of semicontinuous functions, and the general ideal theory for special semirings. (Unfortunately, local alge braists in Poland told me at that time that there was nothing interesting in investigating semiring theory because ring theory was still being developed). However, some time later we became aware of some similar investigations hav ing already been done. The theory of semirings has remained "my first love" ever since, and I have been interested in the results in this field that have been appearing in literature (even though I have not been active in this area myself).

This proceedings book presents edited results of the eighth International Conference on Fuzzy Information and Engineering (ICFIE'2015) and on Oriental Thinking and Fuzzy Logic, in August 17-20, 2015, in Dalian, China. The book contains 65 high-quality papers and is divided into six main parts: "Fuzzy Information Processing", "Fuzzy Engineering", "Internet and Big Data Applications", "Factor Space and Factorial Neural Networks", "Information Granulation and Granular Computing" as well as "Extenics and Innovation Methods".

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Developments in Language Theory, DLT 2011, held in Milano, Italy, in July 2011. The 34 regular papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The volume also contains the papers or abstracts of 5 invited speakers, as well as a 2-page abstract for each of the 7 poster papers. The topics covered include grammars, acceptors and transducers for words, trees and graphs; algebraic theories of automata; codes; symbolic dynamics; algorithmic, combinatorial and algebraic properties of words and languages; decidability questions; applications of language theory, including: natural computing, image manipulation and compression, text algorithms, cryptography, concurrency, complexity theory and logic; cellular automata and multidimensional patterns; language theory aspects of quantum computing and bio-computing.

Successful development of effective computational systems is a challenge for IT developers across sectors due to uncertainty issues that are inherently present within computational problems. Soft computing proposes one such solution to the problem of uncertainty through the application of generalized set structures including fuzzy sets, rough sets, and multisets. The Handbook of Research on Generalized and Hybrid Set Structures and Applications for Soft Computing presents double blind peer-reviewed and original research on soft computing applications for solving problems of uncertainty within the computing environment. Emphasizing essential concepts on generalized and hybrid set structures that can be applied across industries for complex problem solving, this timely resource is essential to engineers across disciplines, researchers, computer scientists, and graduate-level students.

The primary objective of this essential text is to emphasize the deep relations existing between the semiring and dioïd structures with graphs and their combinatorial properties. It does so at the same time as demonstrating the modeling and problem-solving flexibility of these structures. In addition the book provides an extensive overview of the mathematical properties employed by "nonclassical" algebraic structures which either extend usual algebra or form a new branch of it.

There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world. - Nikolai Ivanovich Lobatchevsky This book is an extensively-revised and expanded version of "The Theory of Semirings, with Applicationsin Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science" [Golan, 1992], first published by Longman. When that book went out of print, it became clear - in light of the significant advances in semiring theory over the past years and its new important applications in such areas as idempotent analysis and the theory of discrete-event dynamical systems - that a second edition incorporating minor changes would not be sufficient and that a major revision of the book was in order. Therefore, though the structure of the first «dition was preserved, the text was extensively rewritten and substantially expanded. In particular, references to many interesting and applications of semiring theory, developed in the past few years, had to be added. Unfortunately, I find that it is best not to go into these applications in detail, for that would entail long digressions into various domains of pure and applied mathematics which would only detract from the unity of the volume and increase its length considerably. However, I have tried to provide an extensive collection of examples to arouse the reader's interest in applications, as well as sufficient citations to allow the interested reader to locate them. For the reader's convenience, an index to these citations is given at the end of the book .

The purpose of this Handbook is to highlight both theory and applications of weighted automata. Weighted finite automata are classical nondeterministic finite automata in which the transitions carry weights. These weights may model, e. g. , the cost involved when executing a transition, the amount of resources or time needed for this,or the probability or reliability of its successful execution. The behavior of weighted finite automata can then be considered as the function (suitably defined) associating with each word the weight of its execution. Clearly, weights can also be added to classical automata with infinite state sets like pushdown automata; this extension constitutes the general concept of weighted automata. To illustrate the diversity of weighted automata, let us consider the following scenarios. Assume that a quantitative system is modeled by a classical automaton in which the transitions carry as weights the amount of resources needed for their execution. Then the amount of resources needed for a path in this weighted automaton is obtained simply as the sum of the weights of its transitions. Given a word, we might be interested in the minimal amount of resources needed for its execution, i. e. , for the successful paths realizing the given word. In this example, we could also replace the “resources” by “profit” and then be interested in the maximal profit realized, correspondingly, by a given word.