The use of fuzzy relations in the assessment of information resources producers’ performance

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015. The producers assessment problemhasmany important practical instances: it is an abstract model for intelligent systems evaluating e.g. the quality of computer software repositories, web resources, social networking services, and digital libraries. Each producer’s performance is determined according not only to the overall quality of the items he/she outputted, but also to the number of such items (which may be different for each agent).Recent theoretical results indicate that the use of aggregation operators in the process of ranking and evaluation producers may not necessarily lead to fair and plausible outcomes. Therefore, to overcome some weaknesses of the most often applied approach, in this preliminary study we encourage the use of a fuzzy preference relation-based setting and indicate why it may provide better control over the assessment process.