Dr Montserrat Casanovas
Dr. José María Merigó
Montserrat Casanovas and José María Merigó, both doctors of Economic and Business Sciences and full academicians of the Royal European Academy of Doctors-Barcelona 1914 (RAED), have published together with Agustín Torres, also a doctor in Economic and Business Sciences, the work “Multi-person and multi-criteria decision making with the induced probabilistic ordered weighted average distance” in the last issue of the magazine “Soft Computing” of the Springer publishing house and specialized web site, corresponding to May 2019. A study in which they address the decision making of the company when selecting suppliers based on fuzzy logic.
“This study presents a new approach to selecting suppliers of products or services, specifically with respect to complex decisions that require evaluating different commercial characteristics to guarantee their suitability and to meet the conditions defined in the contracting process”, signal the authors in the introduction of their work. 
To address this issue, Casanovas, Merigó and Torres present a weighted average distance operator taking into account multiple criteria and multiple people, which they call MP-MC-IOWAD. This is an extension of the OWA operators that includes the notion of distances with multiple criteria and valuations.
The study introduces new measures of distance that add to the probabilistic information and the criteria that the decision maker decides to adopt. Additional extensions are developed using probabilities to form the induced weighted average distance operator (IPOWAD). An example is presented in the management of insurance policies, where the selection of insurance companies is very complex and requires the consideration of subjective criteria by experts in decision making.
