On the use of reference profiles to compute alternative PROMETHEE II rankings: A preliminary study

Engineering decision problems often involve the simultaneous optimization of several conflicting criteria. Among multicriteria decision aid methods, PROMETHEE has gained a lot of attention during the last three decades. Despite its successful application in different fields, some researchers have emphasized that PROMETHEE does not respect the independence to third alternatives assumption. This leads to the so-called “rank reversal” phenomenon (potential manipulation threat); the relative position of two alternatives may depend on a third one. In this paper, inspired by the ideas of reference profiles to establish rankings, we propose a new way to compute an alternative PROMETHEE II ranking that does not suffer from rank reversal (common basis for the pairwise comparisons for all the alternatives). We show on an illustrative example the results given by this new method and observe that the obtained ranking is compatible with the one established with the classical PROMETHEE II method.