Natural language estimates of nonlinear response structural sensitivity

摘要

In many cases attempts to employ numeric, or quantitative, methods to contruct adequate computer models of real engineering situations fall definitely short of expectations. It is believed that one of the reasons may be the computer inability to process imprecise, or fuzzy, terms like “very low”, “about four to six”, etc., which are typical of any judgements made by humans. The objective of the paper is to propose a computer-assisted algorithm for assessing nonlinear response structural sensitivity to imperfections. The fuzzy set theory is used to represent imperfections in terms of the natural language expressions. Both the theory and an illustrative example are meant to display the significance of such an approximate reasoning in getting realistic estimates for structural sens