The OR's prize winner and the software ARGOS: how a multijudge and multicriteria ranking GDSS helps a jury to attribute a scientific award

An annual prize is attributed to the best student's final work by the Belgian Operations Research Society. In 1992, the author happened to be a member of the jury designated by this Society to evaluate the candidates and to elect the best one. The three others members of the jury were kindly convinced by the author to use a multiple criteria and multijudge procedure to discriminate the eight candidates qualities, parallely to their more classical global evaluation. In order to facilitate the procedure, a group decision support system (GDSS) was fed by four evaluation matrices given by the team, who defined a common set of criteria completed by an overall direct evaluation. The purposes of this paper are to describe this real-world experiment and to present a multiple criteria procedure of candidates' selection and ranking supported by the software ARGOS (acronym of aid to the ranking to be made by a group of decision makers using an outranking support). This GDSS allows a team of decision makers to run one or several releases of ELECTRE and PROMETHEE methods of preference aggregation in order to deal with the problems of sorting, ranking and of electing the best candidate. A first release of ARGOS is able to deal with the two phases of a group decision process: the multiple criteria preference aggregation performed by each member of the group in the first phase, and, in the second phase, the comparison of results issued from the application of several functions of social choices for supporting the deliberation process of the group, e.g. Borda or Condorcet functions, the Raynaud's prudent orders and some rank disagreements functions. In its second release, ARGOS has been enriched by the addition of JUDGES, the name for another GDSS which compares the rankings given by the team's members and the candidates' distributions of ranks, provides advices for seeking a consensus, and supports voting simulations. Scope and purpose Multiple criteria literature has a rich history. Outranking approach is a very dynamical branch of this literature with its 'star methods' Electre and Promethee. More and more often, real-world applications of these methods involve small teams of decision makers. Another branch of decision aid is concerned with facilitation of small group meeting in view of ranking projects or candidates, and several softwares have been designed for this purpose. Few of them are focused on the junction of both approaches: allowing to deal with outranking in the framework of small team decision making. The purpose of this paper is to present the software ARGOS, which addresses this latter problem through its use in the facilitation of the attribution of a scientific award. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.