Yves De Smet

Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

Computer and Decision Engineering department, Service de Mathématiques de la Gestion

Abstract: Most strategic decision problems involve the evaluation of alternatives according to multiple conflicting criteria. Over the last 60 years, researchers have developed several approaches to address this question. These are usually classified into three main families: interactive, aggregating and outranking methods. PROMETHEE methods belong the latter category.

First introduced by Prof. Jean-Pierre Brans in 1982, they have been widely used in practice. This is probably due to their simplicity and the existence of user-friendly software such as PROMCACL, Decision Lab 2000, D-Sight or Visual PROMETHEE. On the one hand, today, hundreds of applications based on PROMETHEE have been published and extensions to group decision making, robustness and sensitivity analysis, uncertainty management, descriptive problem setting, multicriteria classification and clustering, etc. have been proposed. On the other hand, some authors have stressed some attention points such as the existence of potential rank reversal occurrences or the lack of theoretical foundations. In this talk, we will try to summarize response elements to these questions and list remaining associated research challenges.

Biography: Pr. Yves De Smet holds a degree in Mathematics (1998) and a PhD in Engineering (2005) from the Université libre de Bruxelles. Since 2007, he is a professor at the Ecole polytechnique de Bruxelles where he teaches calculus, probability, statistics and operations research. He has also been an invited professor at the Université de Namur, Université de Nantes, IESEG school of Management, Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Universidade Federal do Amazonas. His research interests cover Multiple Criteria Decision Aid (MCDA) and include methodological developments of PROMETHEE methods (rank reversal study, axiomatization, preference elicitation, robustness concerns, group decision making aspects), multicriteria clustering, belief function theory applied to MCDA, inverse multicriteria optimization, industrial applications, etc. Since 2007, he has supervised and co-supervised 11 PhD theses on these topics and published over 80 contributions in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings. Besides his research and teaching activities, he is regularly involved in multicriteria industrial projects and is co-founder of the D-SIGHT Spin-off.