Luis Martínez-López

Linguistic decision making: Tools and applications

Decision making is a core area of different research pursuits such as engineering, both theory and practice, management, medicine and alike. Issues related to this area have been traditionally handled either by deterministic or by probabilistic approaches. The first one completely ignores uncertainty, while the second one assumes that any uncertainty can be represented as a probability distribution. However in real-world problems (say, engineering, scheduling, and planning) decisions should be made under circumstances with vague, imprecise and uncertain information. Commonly, the uncertainty could be of non-probabilistic nature. Among the appropriate tools to overcome these difficulties are fuzzy logic and fuzzy linguistic approach. The use of linguistic information enhances the reliability and flexibility of classical decision models. This special issue encompasses five papers devoted to the recent developments in the relevant field of linguistic decision making. These submissions embrace theoretical models dealing with uncertain decision making problems as well as applications in which we encounter a great deal of aggregation processes of linguistic information. The first paper A linguistic intelligent guide for method selection in multi-objective decision support systems, is devoted to the use of linguistic information in different decision making models. Zhang and Lu explore the use of linguistic terms to express decision makers’ requirements for Multi-Objective Decision Making methods. In the paper entitled Defining the Borda count in a linguistic decision making context. García-Lapresta et al. elaborate on the use of linguistic decision rules for the Borda count procedure. Two other papers are related to the aggregation of linguistic information. Truck and Akdag present some tools for aggregating linguistic information in their study entitled A tool for aggregation with words. The use of linguistic aggregation is presented by Pei et al. to extract linguistic data summaries in Extracting complex linguistic data summaries from personnel database via a simple linguistic aggregation. The last paper is focused on the application of fuzzy techniques based on the fuzzy linguistic approach to develop evaluation processes. In the study titled A fuzzy model to evaluate the suitability of installing an ERP system, Sánchez et al. present an evaluation model dealing with heterogeneous information. Finally, as Guest Editors of this special issue, we would like to thank all the authors for their contributions and the referees for their outstanding cooperation and constructive input. We sincerely thank W. Pedrycz, Editor-in-Chief of Information Sciences, for providing us with the opportunity to edit this issue.