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.