ELECTRE TRI-nB: A new multiple criteria ordinal classification method

This paper presents a new method for multiple criteria ordinal classification (sorting) problems. This type of problem requires the different classes or categories to be pre-defined and ordered, from the best to the worst or from the worst to the best. The actions (not necessarily known a priori) are assigned to the different ordered classes. Several ELECTRE type methods were designed to deal with this kind of problem. However, none proposes characterization of the categories through a set of limiting profiles. This is the novelty of the current method, which may be considered as an extension of ELECTRE TRI-B. It fulfills a set of structural requirements: Uniqueness of the assignments, independence, monotonicity, homogeneity, conformity, and stability with respect to merging and splitting operations. All these features will be presented in the current paper as well as three illustrative examples.