Electre 1 Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis Using XLSTAT in Excel

 

Dataset for Example

Six potential sites are evaluated (see attached) for welcoming the construction of a brand new recycling center over five criteria:

• Noise that could be generated
• Distance with the city
• Pollution
• Impact on the environment
• Impact on recreations.

The evaluation results are presented below:

 

 

To reflect varying importance of criteria in decision-making, assign weights—higher weights indicate greater importance.

The goal is to identify the site(s) that best meet all criteria for building a new waste center using fictitious data.

 

Setting Up

Open XLSTAT and select: XLSTAT > Marketing> Decision aid > Electre

 The multi-criteria decision aid test dialog box appears.

 In the General tab, select the evaluation data in the Performance matrix field and the criteria weights column in the corresponding field. Adjust concordance and discordance thresholds (0–1) as needed.

Choose Sheet to display results on a new sheet and check Variable labels to use the first row as labels.

In the Outputs tab, enable the following options:

 

Click OK to start computations; results appear on a new sheet named Electre 1.

 

Interpreting the Results

The results start with descriptive statistics per site, followed by the concordance, discordance, and outranking matrices.

 

In this example, only sites 5 and 6 outrank others: site 5 outranks site 4, and site 6 outranks sites 4 and 5.

A value of 0 indicates no outranking. XLSTAT simplifies interpretation with the Ranking table below.

 

 

 Site 6 appears to be the best option. Sites 1, 2, and 3 share third place, while sites 5 and 4 rank lowest.

XLSTAT’s Electre 1 allows sensitivity testing of rankings by enabling the sensitivity analysis (10%) option. It shows threshold ranges that keep results stable. In this example, results hold with thresholds at 1 (concordance) and 0 (discordance), but change at 1 and 0.3.