PROMETHEE-MP: a generalisation of PROMETHEE for multi-period evaluations under uncertainty

Abstract

Sustainability is a major concern and decisions have to be made based on the triple bottom line while simultaneously evaluating the economic, social and environmental impacts. In this context, decisions generally have a planning horizon of several years or even decades and consequently need to be evaluated in the short, medium and long term under uncertainty. This paper intends to tackle this complexity and proposes a multi-period generalisation of PROMETHEE under uncertainty, named PROMETHEE-MP, which is based on a double aggregation (a multi-criteria aggregation and a temporal aggregation), followed by an exploitation phase. The multi-criteria aggregation step uses a generalisation of PROMETHEE III in a situation of random uncertainty with intervals generated by Monte Carlo simulation. For temporal aggregation, we use a measure of distance between pre-orders that captures indifference, strict preference, weak preference and incomparability relations. Finally, we illustrate the proposed PROMETHEE-MP in the context of sustainable forest management.