Preference ranking organization method for enrichment evaluation

PROMETHEE & GAIA are multicriteria decision aid methods that belong to the family of outranking relations. They both offer a descriptive and a prescriptive approach.

On the one hand, the descriptive approach, called GAIA, allows the decision maker to visualize his problem. As a consequence, he is able to easily identify conflicts or synergies between criteria, to categorize alternatives and to highlight interesting performances. On the other hand, the prescriptive approach, called PROMETHEE (Preference Ranking Organization METHod for Enrichment Evaluation), provides the decision maker both a complete and a partial ranking of the alternatives.

The PROMETHEE method has been initiated by Professor Jean-Pierre Brans in the beginning of the eighties. Over the last 30 years, a number of researchers from the CoDE-SMG laboratory of the Université Libre de Bruxelles have also contributed to the development of this methodology. Among them, one can cite Professor Philippe Vincke or Professor Bertrand Mareschal. These research topics mainly cover the creation of visualization tools, the integration of uncertainty modeling, the development of robustness and sensitivity analysis tools or the group decision making aspects.

PROMETHEE has successfully been used in a number of complex decision making problems. Nowadays, hundreds of scientific papers describe its application to numerous area including finance, chemistry, environmental management, logistics ...