Group decision making with distance measures and probabilistic information

This paper develops a new method for group decision making in political management and introduces the probabilistic ordered weighted averaging distance (POWAD) operator. It is a new aggregation operator that uses a unified model between probabilities and the OWA operator considering the degree of importance that each concept has in the particular problem considered. Moreover, it also uses distance measures in the aggregation process. Some of the main properties of the POWAD operator and different particular cases are studied including the probabilistic maximum distance, the probabilistic minimum distance, the probabilistic Hamming distance, the POWA operator, the Hamming distance and the OWA operator. The applicability of the new approach is also analyzed focussing on a political group decision making problem where the government of a country is planning the general strategy for the next year. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.