Title: An adaptive questioning procedure for eliciting PROMETHEE II's weight parameters

Authors: Stefan Eppe; Yves De Smet

Addresses: Computer and Decision Engineering Department, Polytechnic School of Brussels, Université libre de Bruxelles, Avenue Franklin Roosevelt 50, CP210/01, 1050 Brussels, Belgium ' Computer and Decision Engineering Department, Polytechnic School of Brussels, Université libre de Bruxelles, Avenue Franklin Roosevelt 50, CP210/01, 1050 Brussels, Belgium

Abstract: For most decision making problems, finding representative parameters of a decision maker's preferences remains a challenging task. We adapt to the PROMETHEE II outranking method an eliciting procedure named Q-Eval that has been developed in the context of multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT). It refines the estimation of the preference parameters by iteratively querying the DM through pairwise action comparisons. After formalising an extension of this method to two other types of queries: 1) selection of one action from a subset; 2) ranking of a subset of actions, we propose an adaptive query selection scheme that presents to the DM the most discriminating query type at each step of the process. Simulation results show that this approach improves the efficiency of the eliciting phase in terms of convergence speed.

Keywords: preference eliciting; questioning procedure; PROMETHEE II; parameter space analysis; multicriteria decision making; MCDM; adaptive questioning; weight parameters; multi-attribute utility theory; MAUT; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMCDM.2014.059961

International Journal of Multicriteria Decision Making, 2014 Vol.4 No.1, pp.1 - 30

Received: 27 Jul 2012
Accepted: 11 Nov 2012
Published online: 17 May 2014 *

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