Fuzzy Cognitive Map (FCMs) is an appropriate tool to describe, qualitatively analyze or simulate the behavior of complex systems. FCMs are bipolar fuzzy graphs: their building blocks are the concepts and the arcs. Concepts represent the most important components of the system, the weighted arcs define the strength and direction of cause-effect relationships among them. FCMs are created by experts in several cases. Despite the best intention the models may contain subjective information even if it was created by multiple experts. An inaccurate model may lead to misleading results, therefore it should be further analyzed before usage. Our method is able to automatically modify the connection weights and to test the effect of these changes. This way the hidden behavior of the model and the most influencing concepts can be mapped. Using the results the experts may modify the original model in order to achieve their goal. In this paper the internal operation of a department of a bank is modeled by FCM. The authors show how the modification of the connection weights affect the operation of the institute. This way it is easier to understand the working of the bank, and the most threatening dangers of the system getting into an unstable (chaotic or cyclic state) can be identified and timely preparations become possible.

Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) are widely applied for describing the major components of complex systems and their interconnections. The popularity of FCMs is mostly based on their simple system representation, easy model creation and usage, and its decision support capabilities. The preferable way of model construction is based on historical, measured data of the investigated system and a suitable learning technique. Such data are not always available, however. In these cases experts have to define the strength and direction of causal connections among the components of the system, and their decisions are unavoidably affected by more or less subjective elements. Unfortunately, even a small change in the estimated strength may lead to significantly different simulation outcome, which could pose significant decision risks. Therefore, the preliminary exploration of model ‘sensitivity’ to subtle weight modifications is very important to decision makers. This way their attention can be attracted to possible problems. This paper deals with the advanced version of a behavioral analysis. Based on the experiences of the authors, their method is further improved to generate more life-like, slightly modified model versions based on the original one suggested by experts. The details of the method is described, its application and the results are presented by an example of a banking application. The combination of Pareto-fronts and Bacterial Evolutionary Algorithm is a novelty of the approach.

Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCM) are widely applied to support decision making and for the prediction of the future behavior of systems. In this paper several real expert-defined models of an organization will be investigated. Simulations were performed in order to examine the asymptotic behavior of these models, especially to find (all) fixed point attractors, or to discover chaotic behavior. A sigmoid type of inference function was applied, and the effect of the steepness parameter on simulation results was investigated, too. It will be shown by several examples that the steepness parameter may even change the number and values of the final state vectors. In the end, the systematic study of the behavior of the models in terms of the changes of the (uncertain) relationship values among system components were studied.