A general class of aggregation operators with applications to information fusion in distributed systems

A collection of all plausible solutions to a given complex problem is considered, and it is assumed that these solutions are separately ranked by the degree to which they satisfy each member of an a priori chosen criteria set. Oftentimes these rankings can be accurately modeled as partial orders. Given such a collection of partially ordered sets (posets), one may wish to define a class of operators whose members may be used to aggregate this collection of posets into a single poset. Selection of a solution to the given problem can then be performed on this poset directly. The authors propose a framework that allows the construction of a variety of aggregation operators so as to bring forth their algebraic structure