Conflicting criteria, cooperating processors - Some experiments on implementing a multicriteria decision support method on a parallel computer

This paper presents a step-by-step parallel approach to the ELECTRE III multiple criteria outranking method. Several implementations of the method were compared using a multiple instruction multiple data message-passing multiprocessor with 16 processing elements. The programs are described and results are presented considering several test situations. This allowed us to identify the implementation that ran faster and to study its behaviour. It was observed that under certain circumstances the speedups obtained by parallel versions were attractive, namely when applied to the test problems in which the sequential program was slower. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.