Integrating imperfection of information into the PROMETHEE multicriteria decision aid methods: A general framework

Abstract

Multicriteria decision aid methods are used to analyze decision problems including a series of alternative decisions evaluated on several criteria. They most often assume that perfect information is available with respect to the evaluation of the alternative decisions. However, in practice, imprecision, uncertainty or indetermination are often present at least for some criteria. This is a limit of most multicriteria methods. In particular the PROMETHEE methods do not allow directly for taking into account this kind of imperfection of information. We show how a general framework can be adapted to PROMETHEE and can be used in order to integrate different imperfect information models such as a.o. probabilities, fuzzy logic or possibility theory. An important characteristic of the proposed approach is that it makes it possible to use different models for different criteria in the same decision problem.