This volume prepared by Roman Slowinski and Maciej Hapke is welcome because it is representative of the current state of the art in fuzzy set-based scheduling. Its publication proves that some operational research scientists start to consider fuzzy sets seriously as a bridge for a reconciliation between mathematical modeling and human scheduling practice. A difficulty for the reader of the fuzzy set scheduling literature is to understand the precise role of fuzzy sets in the various published papers. More often than not, the meaning of fuzzy sets remain unclear or must be guessed from the context of the problem. A major contribution of this volume is to try and clarify this issue through a suitable ordering of the papers, telling apart those where fuzzy sets is mainly a matter of representing preference, and those where the problem is one of scheduling under uncertainty.
Taken from the foreword by Didier Dubois and Henry Prade