Linear programming attracted the interest of mathematicians during and after World War II when the first computers were constructed and methods for solving large linear programming problems were sought in connection with specific practical problems for example, providing logistical support for the U.S. Armed Forces or modeling national economies. Early attempts to apply linear programming methods to solve practical problems failed to satisfy expectations. There were various reasons for the failure. One of them, which is the central topic of this book, was the inexactness of the data used to create the models. This phenomenon, inherent in most practical problems, has been dealt with in several ways. At first, linear programming models used average values of inherently vague coefficients, but the optimal solutions of these models were not always optimal for the original problem itself. Later researchers developed the stochastic linear programming approach, but this too has its limitations. Recently, interest has been given to linear programming problems with data given as intervals, convex sets and/or fuzzy sets. literature has not presented a unified theory. Linear Optimization Problems with Inexact Data attempts to present a comprehensive treatment of linear optimization with inexact data, summarizing existing results and presenting new ones within a unifying framework.

Linear programming attracted the interest of mathematicians during and after World War II when the first computers were constructed and methods for solving large linear programming problems were sought in connection with specific practical problems for example, providing logistical support for the U.S. Armed Forces or modeling national economies. Early attempts to apply linear programming methods to solve practical problems failed to satisfy expectations. There were various reasons for the failure. One of them, which is the central topic of this book, was the inexactness of the data used to create the models. This phenomenon, inherent in most pratical problems, has been dealt with in several ways. At first, linear programming models used "average" values of inherently vague coefficients, but the optimal solutions of these models were not always optimal for the original problem itself. Later researchers developed the stochastic linear programming approach, but this too has its limitations. Recently, interest has been given to linear programming problems with data given as intervals, convex sets and/or fuzzy sets. The individual results of these studies have been promising, but the literature has not presented a unified theory. Linear Optimization Problems with Inexact Data attempts to present a comprehensive treatment of linear optimization with inexact data, summarizing existing results and presenting new ones within a unifying framework."

The book is a benefit for graduate and postgraduate students in the areas of operations research, decision theory, optimization theory, linear algebra, interval analysis and fuzzy sets. The book will also be useful for the researchers in the respective areas. The first part of the book deals with decision making problems and procedures that have been established to combine opinions about alternatives related to different points of view. Procedures based on pairwise comparisons are thoroughly investigated. In the second part we investigate optimization problems where objective functions and constraints are characterized by extremal operators such as maximum, minimum or various triangular norms (t-norms). Matrices in max-min algebra are useful in applications such as automata theory, design of switching circuits, logic of binary relations, medical diagnosis, Markov chains, social choice, models of organizations, information systems, political systemsand clustering. The input data in real problems are usually not exact and can be characterized by interval values."