The Ordered Weighted Averaging Operators

The Ordered Weighted Averaging Operators

Aggregation plays a central role in many of the technological tasks we are faced with. The importance of this process will become even greater as we move more and more toward becoming an information-cent.ered society, us is happening with the rapid growth of the Internet and the World Wirle Weh. Here we shall be faced with many issues related to the fusion of information. One very pressing issue here is the development of mechanisms to help search for information, a problem that clearly has a strong aggregation-related component. More generally, in order to model the sophisticated ways in which human beings process information, as well as going beyond the human capa bilities, we need provide a basket of aggregation tools. The centrality of aggregation in human thought can be be very clearly seen by looking at neural networks, a technology motivated by modeling the human brain. One can see that the basic operations involved in these networks are learning and aggregation. The Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) operators provide a parameter ized family of aggregation operators which include many of the well-known operators such as the maximum, minimum and the simple average.

Recent Developments in the Ordered Weighted Averaging Operators

Recent Developments in the Ordered Weighted Averaging Operators: Theory and Practice

This volume presents the state of the art of new developments, and some interesting and relevant applications of the OWA (ordered weighted averaging) operators. The OWA operators were introduced in the early 1980s by Ronald R. Yager as a conceptually and numerically simple, easily implementable, yet extremely powerful general aggregation operator. That simplicity, generality and implementability of the OWA operators, combined with their intuitive appeal, have triggered much research both in the foundations and extensions of the OWA operators, and in their applications to a wide variety of problems in various fields of science and technology. Part I: Methods includes papers on theoretical foundations of OWA operators and their extensions. The papers in Part II: Applications show some more relevant applications of the OWA operators, mostly means, as powerful yet general aggregation operators. The application areas are exemplified by environmental modeling, social networks, image analysis, financial decision making and water resource management.