Simple ranking method using reference profiles: incremental elicitation of the preference parameters

The Simple Ranking Method using Reference Profiles (or SRMP) is a Multi-Criteria Decision Aiding technique based on the outranking paradigm, which allows to rank decision alternatives according to the preferences of a decision maker (DM). Inferring the preference parameters of such a model can lead to a cognitive fatigue of the DM, who is often asked to express several preferential statements about pairs of alternatives during the elicitation process. To limit the DM’s effort, we propose in this work an incremental elicitation process to select informative pairs of alternatives to be presented to the DM sequentially with the aim of refining the SRMP model until a robust recommendation can be made. We study several different heuristics for selecting the pair of alternatives to be submitted to the DM at each step. Following extensive numerical experiments we identify one of the proposed heuristics as performing significantly better than the others and we provide several guidelines for its use in practice.