Some Icowa Operators and their Applications to Group Decision Making with Interval Fuzzy Preference Relations

We develop some new cases of the induced continuous ordered weighted averaging (ICOWA) operator and study their desirable properties, which are very suitable to deal with group decision making (GDM) with interval fuzzy preference relations. First, we present the consensus indicator ICOWA (CI-ICOWA) operator which uses the consensus indicator of the interval fuzzy preference as the order inducing variable in the ICOWA operator. Then the concept of compatibility degree (CD) for two interval fuzzy preference relations is defined based on the continuous ordered weighted averaging (COWA) operator and the compatibility degree ICOWA (CD-ICOWA) operator is proposed which uses the CD as the order inducing variable in the ICOWA operator. Next, we investigate some desirable properties of the CD-ICOWA operator. Additionally, we construct an optimization model to obtain the weights of experts by minimizing the compatibility degree in the GDM. Finally, an illustrative numerical example is used to verify the developed approaches.