Linguistic decision making: Tools and applications

Decision Making is a core area of different research pursuits such as engineering, both theory and practice, management, medicine and alike. Issues related to this area have been traditionally handled either by deterministic or by probabilistic approaches. The first one completely ignores uncertainty, while the second one assumes that any uncertainty can be represented as a probability distribution. However in real-world problems (say, engineering, scheduling, and planning) decisions should be made under circumstances with vague, imprecise and uncertain information. Commonly, the uncertainty could be of non-probabilistic nature. Among the appropriate tools to overcome these difficulties are fuzzy logic and fuzzy linguistic approach. The use of linguistic information enhances the reliability and flexibility of classical decision models. This special issue encompasses five papers devoted to the recent developments in the relevant field of linguistic decision making. These submissions embrace theoretical models dealing with uncertain decision making problems as well as applications in which we encounter a great deal of aggregation processes of linguistic information.