Fuzzy ordered distance measures

Xu and Chen (J Syst Sci Syst Eng 17:432-445, 2008) introduced a type of ordered weighted distance measures called ordered weighted distance (OWD) measures whose fundamental aspect is the reordering step, which can be used in many actual fields, including group decision making, medical diagnosis, data mining, and pattern recognition, etc. The OWD measures are very suitable to deal with situations where the input data are expressed in exact numerical values. In this paper, we consider situations with linguistic, interval or fuzzy preference information, and develop some fuzzy ordered distance measures, such as linguistic ordered weighted distance measure, uncertain ordered weighted distance measure, linguistic hybrid weighted distance measure, and uncertain hybrid weighted distance measure, etc. After that, based on hybrid weighted distance measures, we establish a consensus reaching process of group decision making with linguistic, interval, triangular or trapezoidal fuzzy preference information.