Synthesis and evaluation analysis of the indicator information in nuclear safeguards applications by computing with words

This paper aims at the handling and treatment of nuclear safeguard relevant information by using a linguistic assessment approach. This is based on a hierarchical analysis of a State's nuclear activities in a multi-layer structure of the evaluation model. After a hierarchical analysis of the State's nuclear activities on the basis of the IAEA Physical Model, the addressed objective is divided into several less complex levels. The overall evaluation can be obtained step by step from those lower levels. Special emphasis is put on the synthesis and evaluation analysis of the Physical Model indicator information. Accordingly, the aggregation process with the consideration of the different kinds of qualitative criteria is in focus. Especially, the symbolic approach is considered by the direct computation on linguistic values instead of the approximation approacht using the associated membership function. In this framework, several kinds of ordinal linguistic aggregation operators are presented and analyzed. The application of these linguistic aggregation operators to the combination of the Physical Model indicator information is provided. An example is given to support and clarify the mathematical formalism.