Combinatorial engineering of decomposable systems (Q1381552)

The author considers problems which consist of complex systems built from various components. The declared goal of the book is to device a strategy, called hierarchical morphological multicriteria design (HMMD), that tries to detect the interrelation between the different components, to help in decision making and to organize information. In the first chapter the HMMD approach is sketched and auxiliary problems like structural modeling, multicriteria ranking and coordination of scales are introduced. After mentioning some mathematical programming problems in the next chapter, the third one exemplifies the approach on the basis of the morphological clique problem. The comparison of systems is at the focus of Chapter 4 while the next chapter discusses transformations of decomposable systems. Uncertainty, time dependence and fuzzyness are included next. Chapter 7 is devoted to morphological metaheuristics and their potential in solving well-known combinatorial optimization problems. Information support and design related to HMMD is the subject of Chapter 8. Remarks on organizational and educational issues are collected in the subsequent two chapters. Next, applied problems are outlined before the book ends with some conclusions. The main purpose of the book is not clear. When I was asked to review the book I planned to use it as a text or reference book for graduate students. After going through the book it turned out to be not suitable for either purpose. The style of the book is very hard to digest. The text consists of lists of topics - usually numbered and indexed - which are often not related to the main heading of the sections. Clear definitions and results are almost non-existent. Pages after pages are filled with tables belonging to examples which are claimed to be of practical interest, but look very artificial and rather fictitious. The English is very poor including numerous typos, which could have been easily detected, on almost every page. The book contains an extensive bibliography of 554 references related to the subjects discussed in the book. This bibliography is very useful for readers. Overall, I was very disappointed by a book with a very promising title, but which does, unfortunately, not live up to these promises.