European Journal of Operational Research 172 (2006) 366367

www.elsevier.com/locate/ejor

Book Review
Jose Figueira, Salvatore Greco, Matthias Ehrgott
(Eds.), Review of the book Multiple Criteria
Decision AnalysisState of the Art Survey, The
International Series in Operations Research and
Management Science, Springer-Verlag, 2005, ISBN
0-387-23081-5, 1045 pages

1. Introduction
Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA)
is now used in many contexts: nance, planning,
telecommunication, ecology, etc., namely in any
domain in which it is impossible to optimize because there are too many criteria of decision. In
fact, multicriteria decision is the reality of life because it is unfortunately impossible to have your
cake and eat it, for example increase the production and diminish oil consumption, increase the
revenue on stocks and diminish the risk, etc. This
book encompasses MCDA as well as multiobjective programming (MOP). In multiobjective programming the feasible set is a subset of the real
numbers while in MCDA there is only a nite set
of possible alternatives.
As far as this reviewer knows this is the rst
book that gives an overall view of the whole eld
from MCDA to MOP, focusing on the important
methods as regards theoretical aspects and practical usability.

2. Content of the book

This work starts with a brief historical introduction on multicriteria decision marking (MCDM)
by the editors of the book and a guided tour of
the book. The part I contains a single chapter by

doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2005.04.001

B. Roy, which is a fundamental reexion on the

paradigms and limits of MCDA. In part II,
the reader will nd the foundations of MCDA.
The rst chapter, devoted to preference modeling,
is very important because it gives a unied view of
preference relations as well as valued preferences.
The second is theoretically important because it
addresses the question generally eluded in MCDA
of the validity of value representations of multicriteria preferences (utility) and especially of the
additive model.
Part III reviews the outranking methods, i.e. the
methods producing a partial ordering of the alternatives. This part starts with a very large survey of
ELECTRE methods then continues with PROMETHEE and nishes with a description of many
other outranking methods. Additive aggregation
is at the centre of part IV with a presentation of
the KeeneyRaia method (MAUT). Then UTA
is introduced with its variants and applications.
The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) of Saaty
follows within a sixty page chapter including
numerous and interesting examples. Finally, the
method and software MACBETH for building
consistent utility functions is presented.
The part V is devoted to so-called non-classical
MCDA methods. The rst chapter by T. Stewart
explains how to formally introduce uncertainty in
MCDA. Then fuzzy preferences and fuzzy MCDA
are introduced with the presentation of software
packages dealing with fuzzy preferences. Rough
sets, decision tables and rules are also presented
as well as fuzzy aggregation by integrals. The last
chapter introduces verbal decision analysis originally invented by the late O. Larichev.
Part VI is devoted to multiobjective programming (MOP) and begins with interactive methods

Book Review / European Journal of Operational Research 172 (2006) 366367

and follows with a very good chapter reviewing the

subject of MOP. The two last chapters introduce
MOP with fuzzy coecients and, nally, location
problems.
Applications to nance, energy planning, telecommunications, sustainable development are presented in Part V. Finally, the book ends with a
review of the MCDA software packages followed
by a short biography of the authors and an index.

367

subject and nd further developments, only few

of them are insuciently documented e.g. the
chapter on interactive methods. Moreover one
can regret that the notations are not unied, each
author introducing his/her own, the advantage is
that the chapters are largely self-contained. The
book features a relatively modest index, which
has a seemingly systematic shift of4 pages, if
the entries that I have randomly tested are representative of the whole.

3. Discussion
We must thank the editors to have collected the
chapters of so many leaders of the elds such as
B. Roy, Ph. Vincke, D. Bouyssou, M. Pirlot, J.P.
Brans, J.S. Dyer, T.L. Saaty, T. Stewart, M. Roubens, R. Slowinski, M. Grabisch, P. Korhonen, J.
Spronk, R.E. Steuer. Many of these chapters can
be used as reference papers because they bring
under a very readable (and self-contained) form,
up-to-date surveys on basics of MCDA: preference
modelling, conjoint measurement (with a very
good bibliography), outranking methods (ELECTRE, PROMETHEE), MAUT, UTA, AHP,
MACBETH, Multiobjective Programming (also
with a very large bibliography). Besides these fundamentals of MCDA and MOP this book contains
also surveys and overviews of more recent developments, e.g. fuzzy sets, rough sets, fuzzy integrals. Many of these chapters provide a very
large bibliography very useful to deepen the

4. Conclusion
Despite the few weaknesses mentioned above
and the lack of two chapters on purely ordinal
methods and on multicriteria Decision Support
Systems, this book is a reference and mostly valuable working tool. We can be very grateful to the
editors for such a useful collection of many worthwhile chapters.
Jean-Charles Pomerol
Universite P. et M. Curie
Laboratoire LIP6
8 rue du Capitaine Scott
Paris 15, France
Fax: 33 10 44277000
E-mail address: jean-charles.pomerol@lip6.fr
Available online 23 June 2005