A new decision support system for ranking a finite set of multicriteria alternatives

This paper presents a new decision support system for solving multicriteria ranking problems: how to rank a set of alternatives – having evaluations in terms of several criteria – in decreasing order of preference. It uses the ELECTRE III methodology to construct a fuzzy outranking relation, and then a genetic algorithm to exploit it and to obtain a recommendation. The genetic algorithm approach rests on the main idea of reducing differences between the global model of preferences and the final ranking. The system operation is shown within an empirical study of a real student selection problem in the Universidad de Occidente in Mexico.