On Aggregating Uncertain Information by Type-2 OWA Operators for Soft Decision Making

Yager's ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operator has been widely used in soft decision making to aggregate experts' individual opinions or preferences for achieving an overall decision. The traditional Yager's OWA operator focuses exclusively on the aggregation of crisp numbers. However, human experts usually tend to express their opinions or preferences in a very natural way via linguistic terms. Type-2 fuzzy sets provide an efficient way of knowledge representation for modeling linguistic terms. In order to aggregate linguistic opinions via OWA mechanism, we propose a new type of OWA operator, termed type-2 OWA operator, to aggregate the linguistic opinions or preferences in human decision making modeled by type-2 fuzzy sets. A Direct Approach to aggregating interval type-2 fuzzy sets by type-2 OWA operator is suggested in this paper. Some examples are provided to delineate the proposed technique. (C) 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.