Generalized prioritized aggregation operators

This paper deals with multicriteria decision-making problems in which the criteria are partitioned into q categories, and a prioritization relationship exists over categories. We aggregate the criteria in the same priority category by a weighted OWA (ordered weighted averaging) operator and introduce two averaging operators, a generalized prioritized averaging operator and a generalized prioritized OWA operator. In the case with one criterion in each priority category, the two operators reduce to the prioritized averaging operator and the prioritized OWA operator as proposed by Yager. (c) 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.