“…Traditionally, statistical methods, such as exponential smoothing, linear regression, and the Box and Jenkins method, have been applied more frequently (Bevilacqua, Braglia, & Montanari, 2003;Huei-Shyang You, 1998;Kourti & MacGregor, 1996), but in the past few years computational intelligence techniques have also been used successfully. The earliest works made use of expert systems (Medsker, 1994); then came a number of studies using artificial neural nets (Caputo & Pelagagge, 2002;Ho, Xie, & Goh, 2002;Kiartzis, Zoumas, Theocharis, Bakirtzis, & Petridis, 1997;Lucifredi, Mazzieri, & Rossi, 2000;Radmer, Kuntz, Christie, Venkata, & Fletcher, 2002). More recently, several works have employed fuzzy logic systems (Chung Wu, 2004;Figueiredo, Vellasco, Pacheco, & Neto, 2000) and now also neuro-fuzzy systems (Javadpuor & Knapp, 2003;Wang, Golnaraghi, & Ismail, 2004).…”