Applying Fuzzy Decision and Fuzzy Similarity in Agricultural Sciences

Abstract

Decision making in environments that do not allow much algorithmic modeling is not easy. Even more difficulties arise when part of the knowledge is expressed through linguistic terms instead of numeric values. Agricultural Sciences are such environments and Plant Breeding is one of them. This is why Fuzzy Theories can be very useful in building Decision Support Systems in this field. This chapter presents a number of Fuzzy methods to be used for decision support in the selection phase of Plant Breeding programs. First, the utilization of the Fuzzy Multi-Attribute Decision Model is discussed and a case study is analyzed. Then, two Fuzzy Querying methods are suggested. They can be used when a database must be searched in order to extract the information to be utilized in decision making. In this context, the concept of Fuzzy Similarity is important. Ways to employ it in database querying are suggested.