A Handbook on Multi-Attribute Decision-Making Methods

9PROMETHEE

9.1 Introduction

The multiattribute decision‐making (MADM) methods are frameworks through which decision‐makers can depict and mathematically express the intentions of the stakeholders in the form of an evaluation criteria set. Eventually, the decision‐makers attempt to select the most suitable path of actions among the other feasible alternatives available to the given MADM problem. The chosen solution should best reflect the stakeholders’ interests.

Outranking‐oriented methods are one of the major branches of MADM, in which the decision‐makers are presented with a framework through which the evaluation criteria are used to map an outranking relation among the set of feasible alternatives. The alternatives are compared to each other and the one that fully dominates the others would emerge as the final solution to the MADM problem at hand. In most cases, these methods are of iterative nature and this notion adds to the computing costs of decision‐making, especially in cases where the decision‐making process involves many feasible alternatives and evaluation criteria. Or there may be cases in which the methods do not lead to a full outranking list of alternatives. Nevertheless, given the simple nature of the computation algorithms and evaluation taxonomies, and their capability to be hybridize with other mathematical frameworks and algorithms, scholars and decision‐makers greatly favor these methods. The family of preference ranking organization methods for enrichment ...