Multicriteria DSSs: State of the art and problems

The paper surveys the capabilities of the existing multicriteria decision support systems (MCDSSs). It will be shown that in a decision perspective they remain restricted to the ‘choice’ phase and to functionalities related to criteria rather than to alternatives. The paper shows that for a future spreading of MCDSSs, the designers should focus their efforts on the alternatives. Actually, the alternatives envisaged in present systems very often represent a very poor modeling of the reality to be convincing. It is believed that that is now the main weakness of many MCDSSs.