Induced uncertain linguistic OWA operators applied to group decision making

The ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operator was developed by Yager [IEEE Trans. Syst., Man, Cybernet. 18 (1998) 183]. Later, Yager and Filev [IEEE Trans. Syst., Man, Cybernet.-Part B 29 (1999) 141] introduced a more general class of OWA operators called the induced ordered weighted averaging (IOWA) operators, which take as their argument pairs, called OWA pairs, in which one component is used to induce an ordering over the second components which are exact numerical values and then aggregated. The aim of this paper is to develop some induced uncertain linguistic OWA (IULOWA) operators, in which the second components are uncertain linguistic variables. Some desirable properties of the IULOWA operators are studied, and then, the IULOWA operators are applied to group decision making with uncertain linguistic information. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.