A PARALLEL IMPLEMENTATION OF THE PROMETHEE METHOD

The obtainment of a result from a decision support system is usually p receded by a structuring of the decision situation and followed by a r obustness analysis phase. In this last phase the decision makers (DMs) observe the impact of changing the parameters of the decision model b uilt during structuring, in order to learn about the situation and inc rease their confidence on the results. It is essential that the decisi on support system enables interactivity (i.e. provides short response times), otherwise during this phase the DMs will not be encouraged to be as exhaustive as required by the situation. This presents a computa tional challenge when the problems are not of trivial dimension. This paper discusses the application of parallel processing as a means to m eet this challenge when building a decision support system based on th e PROMETHEE multicriteria aid method. Several parallel programs have b een built and compared on a 16-processor computer. Our purpose was to acquire some insight on how the parallel programs do perform under dif ferent situations and to identify the features of the method more rele vant to its parallelisation. We verified that at some situations the r eduction of the computer's response time by means of parallel processi ng is quite appreciable and may foster the use of a decision support t ool. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.