Weights determination of OWA operators by parametric identification

This contribution presents a new approach on weights determination in industrial decision making aided by OWA operators. Multicriteria decision aid is a good way, for an industrialists, to determine his preferred compromise products, in the case of risk products or innovative products. The multi-criteria decision support chosen is the Ordered Weighted Average (OWA) operators, introduced by Yager [R.R. Yager, On ordered weighted averaging aggregation operators in multicriteria decision making, IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. 18 (1988) 183-190]. The interest of this aggregation method is, beyond its simplicity of use, product evaluation according unique scale. Furthermore, the weights are not fixed by criterion but according to utility level. First, a learning sample is ranked by the decision-maker. Then, this ranked sample is used in order to determine the weights by parametric identification. For this, an hypothesis of equipartition of the scores of each sample is used. An industrial application, from a food production, illustrates this approach. The ranks obtained from several samples are compared. (C) 2008 IMACS. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.