In: IEEE Trans. on Systems, Man and Cybernetics - part B: Cybernetics, Vol. 29, No. 3, pages 350-370. 1999.
Abstract: In this paper, a fuzzy Petri net approach to modeling fuzzy rule-based reasoning is proposed to bring together the possibilistic entailment and the fuzzy reasoning to handle uncertain and imprecise information. The three key components in our fuzzy rule-based reasoning-fuzzy propositions, truth-qualified fuzzy rules, and truth-qualified fuzzy facts-can be formulated as fuzzy places, uncertain transitions, and uncertain fuzzy tokens, respectively, Four types of uncertain transitions-inference, aggregation, duplication, and aggregation-duplication transitions-are introduced to fulfill the mechanism of fuzzy rule-based reasoning. A frame work of integrated expert systems based on our fuzzy Petri net, called fuzzy Petri net-based expert system (FPNES), is implemented in Java. Major features of FPNES include knowledge representation through the use of hierarchical fuzzy Petri nets, a reasoning mechanism based on fuzzy Petri nets, and transformation of modularized fuzzy rule bases into hierarchical fuzzy Petri nets. An application to the damage assessment of the Da-Shi bridge in Taiwan is used as an illustrative example of FPNES.
Keywords: damage assessment, expert systems, fuzzy Petri nets, fuzzy truth value, hierarchical Petri nets, possibilistic entailment.