Many outranking methods involve two steps. First, the alternatives are compared pairwise to build a valued outranking relation; this relation is then exploited to derive a recommendation for the decision maker. We present three related exploitation models providing three types of solutions, depending on the decision maker’s request: a linear order, a weak order, or a weak partial order. Each so...

Supervised classification often consists in assigning a set of entities (e.g. alternatives, images, projects, subjects) into pre-defined and homogeneous categories. Categories are known a priori either by defining profiles limit between them or by a set of typical profiles (reference prototypes or elements) for each category. Ordinal Classification (or Sorting) usually refers to an order relati...

The paper deals with the valued comparison of intervals for decision making. Interval orders are classical preference structures where the comparison of intervals is done in an ordinal way. In this paper we focus on valued comparison where more information, especially the distance between end-points of intervals, is used in order to have more sophisticated preference relations. The generalizati...

Decision making is a common process in human activities. Every person or organization needs to make decisions besides dealing with uncertainty and vagueness associated with human cognition. The theory of fuzzy logic provides a mathematical base to model the uncertainities. Hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (HFLTS) creates an appropriate method to deal with uncertainty in decision making. Manag...

We extend a quadrivalent logic of Belnap to graded truth values in order to handle graded relevance of positive and negative arguments provided in preferential information concerning ranking of a finite set of alternatives. This logic is used to design the preference modelling and exploitation phases of decision aiding with respect to the ranking problem. The graded arguments are presented on a...

The multiple criteria aggregation methods allow us to construct a recommendation from a set of alternatives based on the preferences of a decision maker. In some approaches, the recommendation is immediately deduced from the preferences aggregation process. When the aggregation model of preferences is based on the outranking approach, a special treatment is required, but some non-rational viola...

Article history: Received 25 October 2010 Accepted 31 March 2011 Available online 8 April 2011

An essential element in the use of outranking methods for ranking or selection problems arising in the acquisition process of military equipment is the interpretation of incomparabilities. We show how this was done in the PROMETHEE methods by the “GAIA” plane representation, which is implemented in the commercial software “DECISION LAB 2000”. We then discuss how the incomparability analysis can...