Benchmarking in linguistic importance weighted aggregations

In this work we concentrate on the issue of weighted aggregations and provide a possibilistic approach to the process of importance weighted transformation when both the importances (interpreted as benchmarks) and the ratings are given by symmetric triangular fuzzy numbers. We will show that using the possibilistic approach (i) small changes in the membership function of the importances can cause only small Variations in the weighted aggregate; (ii) the weighted aggregate of fuzzy ratings remains stable under small changes in the nonfuzzy importances; (iii) the weighted aggregate of crisp ratings still remains stable under small changes in the crisp importances whenever we use a continuous implication operator for the importance weighted transformation. We illustrate the proposed method by some simple examples. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.