Narrow Results

Decision-making problems often require characterization of alternatives through multiple criteria. In contexts where some of these criteria interact, the decision maker (DM) must consider the interaction effects during the aggregation of criteria scores. The well-known ELECTRE (ELimination Et Choix Traduisant la REalité) methods were recently improved to deal with interacting criteria fulfilling several relevant properties, addressing the main types of interaction, and retaining most of the fundamental characteristics of the classical methods. An important criticism to such a family of methods is that defining its parameter values is often difficult and can involve significant challenges and high cognitive effort for the DM; this is exacerbated in the improved version whose parameters are even less intuitive. Here, we describe an evolutionary-based method in which parameter values are inferred by exploiting easy-to-make decisions made or accepted by the DM, thereby reducing his/her cognitive effort. A genetic algorithm is proposed to solve a regression-inspired nonlinear optimization problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper addressing the indirect elicitation of the ELECTRE model’s parameters with interacting criteria. The proposal is assessed through both in-sample and out-of-sample experiments. Statistical tests indicate robustness of the proposal in terms of the number of criteria and their possible interactions. Results show almost perfect effectiveness to reproduce the DM’s preferences in all situations.

Energy security improvement is often presented as a co-benefit of climate policies. This paper evaluates this claim. It investigates whether climate policy would improve energy security, while accounting for the difficulties entailed by the many-faceted nature of the concept and the large uncertainties on the determinants of future energy systems. A multi-dimension analysis grid is used to capture the energy security concept, and a database of scenarios allows us to explore the uncertainty space. The results, focusing on Europe, reveal there is no unequivocal effect of climate policy on all the perspectives of energy security. Moreover, time significantly matters: the impact of climate policies is mixed in the short term and globally good in the medium term. In the long term, there is a risk of degradation of the energy security. Lastly, we examine the robustness of our results to uncertainties on drivers of economic growth, availability of fossil fuels and the potentials and low-carbon technologies, and find that they are sensitive mainly to fossil fuels availability, low carbon technologies in the energy sector and improvements in energy efficiency.