Decision Drive Products

Products Overview

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The software products that have been developed at ULB or in collaboration with other companies are based on the PROMETHEE-GAIA multicriteria decision aid methodology which has been created at the ULB and VUB universities by Prof. Dr. Jean-Pierre Brans and Prof. Dr. Bertrand Mareschal. The PROMETHEE and GAIA methods belong to the family of the outranking methods that present several advantages over other approaches such as the weighted sum and multi-attribute utility methods (MAUT). These internationally recognized methods have been used in various decision or evaluation contexts for over twenty years. Additional information including an extensive bibliography can be found on the PROMETHEE-GAIA web site.

The PROMETHEE-GAIA multicriteria decision aid methodology has been implemented in different software along time.

Historically, the PROMCALC software was introduced in the 90's and was at that time the first actually usable interactive multicriteria decision aid software based on outranking methodologies. It was developed at the ULB under the MS-DOS operating system. Many interactive and visual capabilities such as the Walking Weights, the Decision Maker's Brains and GAIA were introduced with PROMCALC.

In 2000, a joint venture with the Canadian company Visual Decision gave birth to Decision Lab 2000. This Windows software has been a leading product in the field of multicriteria decision aid systems for nearly a decade. With respect to PROMCALC, Decision Lab introduced a windowed interface, new visual interactive analysis tools, group decision functionalities and a better integration with other productivity software.

In 2010, the Quantitative Methods department has started to develop a new PROMETHEE-based software named Visual PROMETHEE. A functional beta version of Visual PROMETHEE is available as a free evaluation: download.