Elimination Et Choix Traduisant La Realité

ELECTRE is a family of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis methods that originated in Europe in the mid-1960's. The acronym ELECTRE stands for: ELimination Et Choix Traduisant la REalité (ELimination and Choice Expressing REality). As it was first applied in 1965, the ELECTRE method was to choose the best action(s) from a given set of actions, but it was soon applied to three main problems: choosing, ranking and sorting. It evolved into ELECTRE I (electre one) and the evolutions have continued with ELECTRE II, ELECTRE III, ELECTRE IV, ELECTRE IS and ELECTRE TRI (electre tree), to mention a few. The ELECTRE method was one of the earliest approaches in what is sometimes known as the French School of decision making. It is usually classified as an \ outranking method\ of decision making. There are two main parts to an ELECTRE application: first, the construction of one or several outranking relations, which aims at comparing in a comprehensive way each pair of actions; second, an exploitation procedure that elaborates on the recommendations obtained in the first phase. The nature of the recommendation depends on the problem being addressed: choosing, ranking or sorting. Criteria in ELECTRE methods have two distinct sets of parameters: the importance coefficients and the veto thresholds.