PROMETHEE with Precedence Order in the Criteria (PPOC) as a New Group Decision Making Aid: An Application in Urban Water Supply Management

In this paper, a new group Multi-Criteria-Decision-Making (MCDM) method is introduced by combining two “Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluations (PROMETHEE)” and “Multi-attribute decision making with dominance in the criteria” methods. PROMETHEE family of outranking methods is among the recently developed MCDM methods which have received lots of attention in the recent years because of its capacity in ranking finite set of alternative actions based on conflicting criteria. The second method helps the decision makers to consider ambiguity and imprecision of relative importance of each objective (criterion) without allocating importance weights to them. The proposed method of PROMETHEE with Precedence Order in the Criteria (PPOC) not only can address capabilities of PROMETHEE method just with determination of precedence order of criteria, but also can make it possible to have a group decision making environment with conflicting objectives. Operational management of an urban water supply system is a good example of a set of decision making problems with several objectives and Decision Makers (DMs). In this paper, PPOC method has been applied to the case study of Melbourne water supply system, previously analyzed in the literature, to assess a number of operation rules with respect to eight criteria evaluated under single or group decision-making situations. The satisfaction degree of each DM and the overall group ranking results have also been provided in the paper. The proposed method is applicable for different decision making problems in urban water supply management. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012