Outranking relations such as produced by the Electre I or II or the Tactic methods are based on a concordance and non-discordance principle that leads to declaring that an alternative is “superior” to another, if the coalition of attributes supporting this proposition is “sufficiently important” (concordance condition) and if there is no attribute that “strongly rejects” it (non-discordance con...

We consider a finite set of alternatives A = {a1, a2, . . . , am} evaluated on a family of n criteria F = {g1, g2, . . . , gn}. Let N = {1, 2, . . . , n}. To each criterion gi ∈ F is assigned a positive weight wi. It is supposed wlog that the weights are normalized so that ∑n i=1wi = 1. Let Xi = {gi(a) : a ∈ A} be the set of evaluations of the alternatives on the ith criterion. It is supposed t...

The purpose of this paper is to study some properties of outranking relations based on a concordance-discordance principle. We show that, whenever the structure of the set of alternatives is sufficiently rich, imposing "nice" transitivity properties on such outranking relations always leads to a somewhat unappealing distribution of "power" among the various attributes. These results directly ap...

Most outranking methods build a preference relation between alternatives evaluated on several attributes using the concordance / non-discordance principle. This principle leads to declaring that an alternative is “superior” to another, if the coalition of attributes supporting this proposition is “sufficiently important” (concordance condition) and if there is no attribute that “strongly reject...

Outranking relations such as produced by the Electre I or II or the Tactic methods are based on a concordance and non-discordance principle that leads to declaring that an alternative is “superior” to another, if the coalition of attributes supporting this proposition is “sufficiently important” (concordance condition) and if there is no attribute that “strongly rejects” it (non-discordance con...

In this paper, we propose the THESEUS method, a new approach based on fuzzy outranking relations to multi-criteria sorting problems. Compared with other outranking-based methods, THESEUS is inspired by another view of multi-criteria classification problems. It utilizes a new way of evaluating the assignment of an object to an element of the set of ordered categories that were previously defined...

In ELECTRE methods, the construction of an outranking relation amounts at validating or invalidating, for any pair of alternatives (a; b), the assertion ‘‘a is at least as good as b’’. This comparison is grounded on the evaluation vectors of both alternatives, and on additional information concerning the decision maker s preferences, accounting for two conditions: concordance and non-discordanc...

Multiple attribute decision making forms an important part of the decision process for both small (individual) and large (organization) problems. When available information is precise, many methods exist to solve this problem. But the uncertainty and fuzziness inherent in the structure of information make rigorous mathematical models inappropriate for solving this type of problems. This paper i...

Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) techniques are gaining popularity in sustainable energy management. The techniques provide solutions to the problems involving conflicting and multiple objectives. Several methods based on weighted averages, priority setting, outranking, fuzzy principles and their combinations are employed for energy planning decisions. A review of more than 90 published pa...