PROMETHEE-compatible presentations of multicriteria evaluation tables

Abstract

Most decision problems involve the simultaneous optimisation of several conflicting criteria. Generally, the first step to solve such problems is to identify the set of alternatives and the criteria they will be evaluated on, leading to the construction of an evaluation table. Of course, there are numerous ways to build such a table and to represent it. For a problem of n alternatives and m criteria, there are n! • m! possibilities of representation. However, from a multicriteria point of view some of them can be more interesting than the others. In this article, we will make use of the PROMETHEE and GAIA methods from which the extracted information will serve to restructure such tables. In order to evaluate the properties of these PROMETHEE-based representations, an indicator will be defined that uses only ordinal information of the values contained in a given table. This measure will also serve as a fitness function for a genetic algorithm that will find good - if not the best - tables. These will allow to draw comparisons with PROMETHEE-based representations.