Applications of the Linguistic OWA Operators in Group Decision Making

Abstract

Assuming a group decision making problem where the experts express their opinions by means of linguistic preference relations, the application of the Linguistic OWA operator guided by fuzzy majority is analyzed. Two different perspectives of the use of the LOWA operator are presented: (i) in the selection process, to aggregate individual linguistic preference relations in a collective one and to calculate different linguistic choice degrees of the alternatives, and (ii) in the consensus reaching process to obtain the linguistic consensus measures. In all cases, the concept of fuzzy majority is represented by means of a fuzzy linguistic quantifier used to obtain the weights that the LOWA operator needs in its aggregation way.