Temporal MCDA Methods for Decision-Making in Sustainable Development Context

Public decision-making problems are more and more complex in a context where decisions have to be made based concurrently on economic, social, and environmental considerations. In this context, decisions need to be evaluated in the short, medium, and long term because their planning horizons are usually of several years or even decades. A literature review on MCDA methods used in the sustainable development (SD) context shows that most MCDA methods used are static and existing research does not propose any aggregation framework for temporal assessment of actions. In the last 5 years, development of temporal MCDA has witnessed the interest of some researchers. However, the latest developments remain limited, and only a few research studies offer aggregation frameworks for multi-period settings. This paper presents two recent temporal MCDA methods that were applied in SD context. The first is MUPOM method which demonstrates how outranking methods, based on concordance-discordance principles, can be generalized to processing temporal impacts of decisions. The second, named PROMETHEE-MP, consists of a multi-period generalization of PROMETHEE under random uncertainty.