Aggregation Operators: Properties, Classes and Construction Methods

Abstract

Aggregation (fusion) of several input values into a single output value is an indispensable tool not only of mathematics or physics, but of majority of engineering, economical, social and other sciences. The problems of aggregation are very broad and heterogeneous, in general. Therefore we restrict ourselves in this contribution to the specific topic of the aggregation of finite number of real inputs only. Closely related topics of aggregating infinitely many real inputs [23,109,64,52,43,42,44,99], of aggregating inputs from some ordinal scales [41,50], of aggregating complex inputs (such as probability distributions [107,114], fuzzy sets [143]), etc., are treated, among others, in the quoted papers, and we will not deal with them. In this spirit, if the number of input values is fixed, say n, an aggregation operator is a real function of n variables. This is still a too general topic. Therefore we restrict our considerations regarding inputs as well as outputs to some fixed interval (scale) I = [a, b] ⊑ [-∞, ∞]. It is a matter of rescaling to fix I = [0,1].