The uncertain OWA operator

The ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operator was introduced by Yager(1) to provide a method for aggregating several inputs that lie between the max and min operators. In this article, we investigate the uncertain OWA operator in which the associated weighting parameters cannot be specified, but value ranges can be obtained and each input argument is given in the form of an interval of numerical values. The problem of ranking a set of interval numbers and obtaining the weights associated with the uncertain OWA operator is studied. (C) 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.