Fusion of multi-agent preference orderings

The problem of fusing the preferences of multiple agents with respect to a set of possible courses of action is described in this work. The approach developed in this work does not require a common scale, neither numeric, linguistic or ordinal, to be shared by the interacting agents; it only requires that each agent provide their preferences over the different courses of action in terms of an ordering relationship, information of the type: action A is preferred to action B. Even though the method developed uses a minimal amount of information from the agents it can support various different types of relationships with respect to an agent's importance in the problem of coming to a fused group consensus. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.