Multiple Criteria Decision Support

Multiple criteria decision support methodologies aim to assist decision makers in making difficult decisions when many conflicting viewpoints have to be considered. After introducing the main concepts and principles, some basic approaches to multiple criteria decision aiding are presented, with an emphasis on recent contributions. Three main families of aggregation methods are distinguished by the type of the preference model involved: multiple attribute value theory, outranking-based methods, and methods using sets of decision rules. They are analyzed in detail, together with the way of providing robust recommendations by means of robust ordinal regression and stochastic multicriteria acceptability analysis. A brief overview of recent trends in the field is also included. All the concepts and methods are presented from the perspective of a single decision maker since group decisions involving multiple evaluation criteria have to solve the criteria aggregation problem taking into account preferences of particular decision makers.