Exploitation procedure based on eigenvector revisited: the concept of weighted preference flows in multicriteria outranking analysis

The outranking analysis has been frequently used to deal with the complex decisions involving qualitative criteria and imprecise data. So far, various versions of ELECTRE have been proposed for ranking alternatives in the outranking analysis. Among others, ELECTRE III has been widely used. A weakness of ELECTRE III, however, is to involve the arbitrariness in the selection of the discrimination threshold function for the distillation procedure. On the other hand, various variants of PROMETHEE have also been proposed for the outranking analysis. A deficiency of PROMETHEE is that it does not take discordance into account when the outranking relation matrix is constructed. This note revisits an exploitation procedure based on eigenvector using the ‘weighted’ preference in-and out-flows of each alternative in the outranking analysis.