Abstract
In a sharp departure from the conventional approaches to decision analysis, the linguistic approach abandons the use of numbers and relies instead on a systematic use of words to characterize the values of variables, the values of probabilities, the relations between variables, and the truth-values of assertions about them.
The linguistic approach is intended to be used in situations in which the system under analysis is too complex or too ill-defined to be amenable to quantitative characterization. It may be used, in particular, to define an objective function in linguistic terms as a function of the linguistic values of decision variables.
In cases in which the objective function is vector-valued, the linguistic approach provides a language for an approximate linguistic characterization of the trade-offs between its components. Such characterizations result in a fuzzy set of Pareto-optimal solutions, with the grade of membership of a solution representing the complement of the degree to which it is dominated by other solutions.
Research sponsored by Naval Electronics Systems Command Contract N00039-76-C-0022, U.S. Army Research Office Contract DAHC04-75- G0056 and National Science Foundation Grant ENG74-06651-A01.
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Zadeh, L.A. (1976). The Linguistic Approach and Its Application to Decision Analysis. In: Ho, Y.C., Mitter, S.K. (eds) Directions in Large-Scale Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-2259-7_20
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