Fuzzy risk analysis based on linguistic aggregation operators

Abstract

The aim of fuzzy risk analysis is to evaluate the probability of failure of every component consisting of many sub-components and the probability of failure is the combination of estimations of severity of loss and probability of failure of sub-components which are vaguely known. In this paper, we present a new method for fuzzy risk analysis with linguistic evaluating values. Firstly, we propose the unbalanced linguistic weighted geometric operator, which can be used to deal with aggregation of unbalanced linguistic values with numerical weights. Then, we generalize the operator to deal with aggregation of unbalanced linguistic values with linguistic weights, and discuss some properties of the operator. Finally, we apply the operator to aggregate linguistic evaluating values of fuzzy risk analysis. A comparison is given between the new method in this paper and the one based on interval-valued fuzzy numbers in the same linguistic evaluating values. The advantages of our method are that the evaluating result is linguistic value which is no need of approximation processing and easier to communicate to decision- and policy-makers, no loss of information and no complex computation due to the linguistic aggregation operator and the 2-tuple fuzzy linguistic representations.