This book offers a comprehensive overview of cutting-edge approaches for decision-making in hierarchical organizations. It presents soft-computing-based techniques, including fuzzy sets, neural networks, genetic algorithms and particle swarm optimization, and shows how these approaches can be effectively used to deal with problems typical of this kind of organization. After introducing the main classical approaches applied to multiple-level programming, the book describes a set of soft-computing techniques, demonstrating their advantages in providing more efficient solutions to hierarchical decision-making problems compared to the classical methods. Based on the book Fuzzy and Multi-Level Decision Making (Springer, 2001) by Lee E.S and Shih, H., this second edition has been expanded to include the most recent findings and methods and a broader spectrum of soft computing approaches. All the algorithms are presented in detail, together with a wealth of practical examples and solutions to real-world problems, providing students, researchers and professionals with a timely, practice-oriented reference guide to the area of interactive fuzzy decision making, multi-level programming and hierarchical optimization.

Managerial Decisions in hierarchy organizations, such as the various manufacturing and service companies, are difficult to formalize and even more difficult to optimize. By exploring the typical fuzziness, vagueness, or the "not-well-defined" nature of such organizations, this book presents the first comprehensive treatment of this difficult and practically important problem. The advantages of the proposed fuzzy interactive approach are that it significantly reduces computational requirements. Equally, the representation of the system is made more realistic through the recognition of the inherent fuzziness of such large organizations. Both the multi-ploy and the game-like decision making processes, also known as multi-level programming and the fuzzy interactive approach, are discussed in detail. The emphasis is on numerical algorithms and numerous examples are solved and compared. The concepts of fuzzy set and fuzzy linguistic representation, which form an integral part of any managerial decision, are also discussed.