The Construction of Prescriptions in Outranking Methods

Abstract

Multiple Criteria aggregation methods are designed to construct a prescription (a solution) from a set of alternatives in accordance with the preferences of a decision maker (DM) or a group of DMs. In many approaches, the prescription is immediately derived from the aggregation process. However, when the aggregation process is based on the outranking approach, additional treatments are required to construct the prescription. More precisely, it is customary to distinguish two basic stages in outranking methods: construction of one (or several) outranking relation(s) for modelling the DM’s preferences, exploitation of this (or these) outranking relation(s) in order to construct the prescription according to a specific problem statement.