Three contributions to the PROMETHEE II method

In this thesis, aggregating several published journal articles and conference papers, we propose three contributions that relate to the method: 1) Outranking methods are based on the pairwise comparison of all considered alternatives, yielding a quadratic time complexity for evaluating the net flow scores. We propose a method for reducing to a linear time complexity and show that it offers good results; 2) Determining preference parameters, i.e., relative weights for each criterion, is not a trivial task. We propose two complementary approaches to eliciting preferences, based on the aggregation-disaggregation paradigm; 3) The phenomenon of rank reversal, that also affects the PROMETHEE II method, is often considered as problematic in the MCDA community. We formalise the exact conditions for rank reversal to occur with PROMETHEE II when adding or removing one or more alternatives to the original set. These conditions lead to the exact bound of rank reversal, a way to determine the actions that actually provoke rank reversal and two associated metrics that should be useful for concrete applications.