A new ranking method based on outranking relations

Abstract

We consider the problem of ranking alternatives evaluated on several criteria. This problem may arise in many real life applications like ranking countries, cities, projects, universities, academic programs and students. A number of methods have been proposed for this problem. ELECTRE, one of the widely used ranking methods, uses outranking relations between the alternatives. The main shortcoming of ELECTRE is its requirements of explicit definition of parameters which can be difficult for the decision maker to provide in advance. We develop an outranking based ranking method which requires only a subset of parameters and ranks the alternatives by mathematical models. A real life example is used to illustrate the method. © Izmir University of Economics, Turkey, 2010.