Granular Computing: A Problem Solving Paradigm

Granulation is a natural problem-solving methodology deeply rooted in human thinking; it is intrinsically fuzzy, vague and imprecise. Mathematicians idealized it to partition, and developed into a fundamental problem solving methodology. Granulation and partition are examined in parallel from the prospect of problem solving. In partition theory, knowledge processing are transformed into table or tree processing. For general granulation such transformation is not there. In this paper, we take a new fresh look at previous results (Lin, 1998a), including the recent applications in computer security (Chinese Wall Security Policy model) from this prospect; the knowledge processing have been transformed to table and tree processing in the (pre-)topological setting