A Novel Dispersion Measure of OWA Operator for Spatial Multicriteria Decision Making

The OWA operator has been defined by Yager since 1988 to provide a unified framework for decision making under uncertainty. To apply the OWA operator for decision making, a very crucial issue is to determine its weights, since the results of the combination carried out by OWA heavily depends on definition of the weight vectors. In this article, concerning a new definition of the dispersion measure, a model for determining the OWA weights is developed and introduced. Furthermore, the obtained results are compared with other existing methods. It is also demonstrated that the proposed method does not follow a regular distribution. Then, the sensitivity analysis is carried out to show the robustness of the method. Finally, this model is used in a real application to determine where a new gas station should be located. And the obtained results are compared with the results of one of the mostly used methods, namely the minimum variance method.