A Handbook on Multi-Attribute Decision-Making Methods

8ELECTRE

8.1 Introduction

Too often in real‐world decision‐making, the decision‐makers are faced with a situation in which the interests of the stakeholders can only be represented with conflicting set of evaluation criteria, while there is more than one plausible solution that the decision‐makers must take under consideration. In most cases no single, obvious, solution can emerge, for these alternatives cannot fully dominate one another in terms of all the evaluation criteria. To overcome this conundrum, the decision‐maker must be represented with a solid, logically supported, mathematical framework, provided by the multi‐attribute decision‐making (MADM) methods. As far as MADM is concerned, the aforementioned dilemma is mathematically expressed as evaluating a set of feasible alternatives, denoted by A = {a₁, a₂, …, a_i, …, a_m}, where a_i is the ith alternative and m is the number of alternatives under consideration, in terms of a set of predefined evaluation criteria, denoted by C = {c₁, c₂, …, c_j, …, c_n}, where c_j represents the jth criteria and n denotes the number of evaluation criteria (Yu 1990). Logically, the solution under such circumstances would be the alternative with the most desirable overall performance.

In light of MADM, the decision‐makers are provided with a vast range of viable, logic‐oriented, frameworks that enable them to perform sound decision‐making and secure the interests of stakeholders. One of the schools of thoughts in MADM is referred to as the ...