ELECTRE

ELECTRE is a family of multi-criteria decision analysis methods that originated in Europe in the mid-1960s. The acronym ELECTRE stands for: ELimination Et Choix Traduisant la REalité (ELimination and Choice Expressing REality).

The method was first proposed by Bernard Roy and his colleagues at SEMA consultancy company. A team at SEMA was working on the concrete, multiple criteria, real-world problem of how firms could decide on new activities and had encountered problems using a weighted sum technique. Bernard Roy was called in as a consultant and the group devised the ELECTRE method. As it was first applied in 1965, the ELECTRE method was to choose the best action(s) from a given set of actions, but it was soon applied to three main problems: choosing, ranking and sorting. The method became more widely known when a paper by B. Roy appeared in a French operations research journal. It evolved into ELECTRE I (electre one) and the evolutions have continued with ELECTRE II, ELECTRE III, ELECTRE IV, ELECTRE IS and ELECTRE TRI (electre tree), to mention a few. They are used in the fields of business, development, design, and small hydropower.