ELECTRE and PROMETHEE MCDA methods as reusable software components

Open source software components implementing features of the ELECTRE and PROMETHEE family of MCDA procedures have been developed at Université Libre de Bruxelles and École Centrale Paris, as part of the Decision Deck project. As these procedures share several computation routines, they have been implemented as a set of independent components which can then be assembled in various ways. Care has been taken to develop complete structures representing the underlying MCDA concepts, thereby providing easy to reuse artifacts. The goal was to make them easy to use for the end-user as well as for a developer usage, i.e. to allow building of more complex functionalities on top of these objects. The components deal with XMCDA conforming files (i.e., files conforming to the XMCDA grammar, a standard published by the Decision Deck consortium) in input and output and can also be helpful for a developer wanting to provide his own software with the ability to read or write such files. This article describes the architecture of the components and details some of their usage possibilities.