Ordered visibility graph average aggregation operator: An application in produced water management

Complex networks are widely used in modeling complex system. How to aggregate data in complex systems is still an open issue. In this paper, an ordered visibility graph average aggregation operator is proposed which is inspired by the complex network theory and Newton's law of universal gravitation. First of all, the argument values are ordered in descending order. Then a new support function is proposed to measure the relationship among values in a visibility graph. After that, a weighted network is constructed to determine the weight of each value. Compared with the other operators, the new operator fully takes into account not only the information of orders but also the correlation degree between the values. Finally, an application of produced water management is illustrated to show the efficiency of the proposed method. The new method provides a universal way to aggregate data in complex systems.