Solving mathematical programming problems with OWA operators as objective functions

The ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operators are introduced and some of their properties described. Attention is then focused on the problem of maximizing an objective function which is of the form of an OWA aggregation of a group of variables that are interrelated and constrained by a collection of linear inequalities. It is shown how this problem can be modeled as a integer linear programming problem. Use is made of this procedure to provide a solution to fuzzy linear programming problems in which some linguistically proscribed number of the goals must be satisfied