Fuzzy Systems in Germany: Historical Remarks

Fuzzy Set Theory was recognized by some scientists in Germany already at the beginning of the seventies. While control engineers in Great Britain developed the concept of a fuzzy controller and showed that it worked, on the Continent, research was more done in the mathematical areas and in particular in Operations Research where the first institutional working group (European working group of fuzzy sets) was established in 1976. In German universities research was predominantly in mathematical areas. At the Universities of Wuppertal and Mainz, for instance, research was performed in the areas of fuzzy topology and algebra while at the University of Braunschweig in the early eighties research on fuzzy measures and the interface between classical statistics and fuzzy set theory was done. At the Institute of Technology in Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) empirical and axiomatic research went on at that time. In the Chair for Operations Research, empirical as well as axiomatic basic research concerning operators and membership functions was started in 1972. This research overlapped with the development of “fuzzy linear programming” and its applications to multi-criteria-analysis and various other areas.