ELECTRE: A comprehensive literature review on methodologies and applications

Highlights

• Reviewed 686 articles on ELECTRE and ELECTRE-based methods.

• Categorized the review into 13 application areas under four main groups.

• Gaps of related research are identified.

Abstract

Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is a valuable resource within operations research and management science. Various MCDA methods have been developed over the years and applied to decision problems in many different areas. The outranking approach, and in particular the family of ELECTRE methods, continues to be a popular research field within MCDA, despite its more than 40 years of existence. In this paper, a comprehensive literature review of English scholarly papers on ELECTRE and ELECTRE-based methods is performed. Our aim is to investigate how ELECTRE and ELECTRE-based methods have been considered in various areas. This includes area of applications, modifications to the methods, comparisons with other methods, and general studies of the ELECTRE methods. Although a significant amount of literature on ELECTRE is in a language different from English, we focus only on English articles, because many researchers may not be able to perform a study in some of the other languages. Each paper is categorized according to its main focus with respect to ELECTRE, i.e. if it considers an application, performs a review, considers ELECTRE with respect to the problem of selecting an MCDA method or considers some methodological aspects of ELECTRE. A total of 686 papers are included in the review. The group of papers considering an application of ELECTRE consists of 544 papers, and these are further categorized into 13 application areas and a number of sub-areas. In addition, all papers are classified according to the country of author affiliation, journal of publication, and year of publication. For the group of applied papers, the distribution by ELECTRE version vs. application area and ELECTRE version vs. year of publication are provided. We believe that this paper can be a valuable source of information for researchers and practitioners in the field of MCDA and ELECTRE in particular.

Introduction

Decision-making is an important part of most human activities, regardless if we are performing daily activities, professional or political work. Some decisions may be relatively simple, especially if the consequences of a bad decision are small, while others can be very complex and have significant effects. Real-life decision problems will, in general, involve several conflicting points of view (criteria) that should be taken into account conjointly, in order to arrive at a reasonable decision.

Research devoted to such problems is most often referred to as multi-criteria decision making or multiple criteria decision making (MCDM). Some authors prefer the name multiple criteria decision aid or aiding (MCDA), e.g. Roy (1990), while others use the name multiple criteria decision analysis. We will use MCDA as it is considered most appropriate for ELECTRE methods (Figueira, Greco, Roy, & Slowinski, 2013). Many different methods have been proposed to assist in MCDA problems (Zavadskas & Turskis, 2011). A common trait for these methods is that they attempt to manage “at best” the conflicting character of the various criteria, in order to assist a decision maker in making a qualified decision.

MCDA is a sub-field of operations research or management science and has attracted increasing attention of researchers for more than half a century. A considerable amount of literature has been published on various MCDA methods and their applications (Köksalan, Wallenius, & Zionts, 2011). For some of the most popular methods, the amount of literature can make it very hard for anyone to form a general overview of the potential of such a method. In addition, literature in other languages than English is common for some methods, which makes it inaccessible to many researchers.

Researchers wanting to obtain deep insight into a particular MCDA method with which they are not familiar will, of course, have to perform a literature review themselves. This is, however, a very time-consuming process, and in such cases the use of an existing review paper focusing on the specific method can save a lot of time. For other researchers performing a study of MCDA applications in a specific area, such a review may be even more valuable if it also contains categorized descriptions of applications of the method.

Various classifications of MCDA methods have been proposed in the literature (Mendoza & Martins, 2006). One of the early categorizations classifies MCDA methods into two groups according to the size of the set of alternatives under consideration. Multi-attribute decision making (MADM) methods are designed for problems with a pre-defined discrete set of alternatives, whereas multi-objective decision making (MODM) methods are for problems where the alternatives are not pre-defined (Hwang & Yoon, 1981). It should be noted that the terms MADM and MCDA (or MCDM) sometimes are used interchangeably in the literature (Triantaphyllou, 2000), which may lead to some confusion. Another classification proposed by Belton and Stewart (2002) considers three types of MCDA methods: (1) value measurement models, where each alternative is assigned a numerical score that can be used to indicate the degree to which a given alternative is preferred to another; (2) goal, aspiration or reference level models that attempt to select alternatives, which are closest to achieve some pre-defined goals or aspirations; (3) outranking models, which are based on pairwise comparisons of alternatives against each other (or against a pre-defined norm) on each criterion, followed by a procedure that aggregates and exploits the information, in order to determine the strength of evidence supporting that one alternative should be favored over another (Mendoza & Martins, 2006).

A number of review papers have been published on some of the most popular MCDA methods. These papers generally fall into one of three categories:

• Categorization and description of applications of the method. These reviews focus on a specific method and provide a categorization of the papers according to the application areas, in which the method has been considered. Examples are Behzadian, Otaghsara, Yazdani, and Ignatius (2012) (TOPSIS) and Vaidya and Kumar (2006) (AHP).

• Methodological developments of the method. Here the focus is on reviewing papers concerned with the methodological developments of a given method. Examples are Wallenius et al. (2008) (MAUT) and Figueira et al. (2013) (ELECTRE).

• Papers focusing on both of the above, e.g. Behzadian, Kazemzadeh, Albadvi, and Aghdasi (2010) (PROMETHEE).

With respect to the family of ELECTRE methods, Figueira et al. (2013) provided an updated version of a book chapter by Figueira, Mousseau, and Roy (2005), which gives a thorough review of the background and the developments of the methods in the family as well as some of their extensions. Several other papers include ELECTRE within a general review of MCDA or outranking methods, e.g. Roy (1991) and Roy and Vincke (1981), a general review of a specific range of MCDA methods, e.g. Zopounidis and Doumpos (2002b) or a review of decision aiding within a specific application area, e.g. Lahdelma, Salminen, and Hokkanen (2000) and Xidonas and Psarras (2009). However, to our knowledge, no existing papers on ELECTRE fall into the first or the third category of reviews.

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review and categorization of English journal articles¹ on ELECTRE. The main focus is on papers dealing with applications or developments of ELECTRE and ELECTRE-based methods, but papers on developments of concepts used within ELECTRE are also included. In addition, review papers dealing with a specific application area, such as environmental or financial management, are included, as long as they describe applications of one or more ELECTRE methods. Finally, we also include papers considering the problem of selecting an appropriate MCDA method, provided that an ELECTRE method is one of the methods under consideration. We focus on journal papers for three reasons: first of all because they contain valuable information for researchers studying ELECTRE, secondly because the periodical nature of journals ensures that they continuously provide the latest research results, and finally because they generally are more accessible via online databases than other sources, such as books, book chapters, and conference proceedings. Of course the exclusion of non-English literature and literature other than journal articles will limit the review.

The rest of the paper is structured as follows: In Section 2, the history and a few of the fundamental concepts of ELECTRE are briefly reviewed. Section 3 presents the research methodology used for the literature review. In Section 4, the main classification scheme is explained in detail. The main classification of the 686 papers as well as the definition of categories for application areas and subsequently categorization of the 544 applied papers is presented in Section 5. Section 6 introduces five other classifications of the papers. Finally, in Section 7 we present our conclusions and a number of possible future research directions.