Imprecise methods in measurement

Measurement is usually characterized by its accuracy and there are certain fields where the availability of more and more precise measuring equipment is of key importance. Unfortunately additional requirements like speed, costs, etc. may strongly limit the designer in achieving the specified precision. Moreover the complexity of measurement problems of current interest has considerably increased. Recent advances in time-critical computing and new modeling techniques provide promising tools to meet these requirements. Due to some of their features hereafter these techniques will be referred as `imprecise′ computational methods. For a measurement engineer the most important knowledge is when and how to apply such new tools, what are the decisions not covered by the theory and how to characterize the final results. Based on the analysis of some measurement problems the authors discuss these questions and point out that the importance of these `imprecise′ calculations is much higher than anticipated. The investigations are followed by an example demonstrating the application of fuzzy logic to a particular measurement problem.