EXTRA: An expert system for multi-criteria decision making

This paper presents an expert system approach to a classical decision making problem; aiding in the selection of a preferred action from a list of alternatives evaluated on several criteria. In outranking methods, the non-compensatory aggregation procedure uses an importance relation on criteria subsets. In EXTRA, the decision maker’s knowledge on this important relation are treated purely formally, without converting them into weights. Therefore each outranking relation may be explained in terms of the input information and of some simple axioms. Finally, the multicriteria analysis process is illustrated and studied on a real world problem: the media selection.