Progressive methods in multiple criteria decision analysis

This is a summary of the author's Ph.D. thesis, defended on 8 October 2007 at the University of Luxembourg and the Facult, Polytechnique de Mons, under the joint supervision of Raymond Bisdorff and Marc Pirlot. The thesis is written in English and is available from the author upon request. The work is situated in the field of multiple criteria decision analysis. It mostly deals with what we call progressive methods, i.e., iterative procedures presenting partial conclusions to the decision maker that can be refined at further steps of the analysis. Such progressive methods have been studied in the context of multiattribute value theory and outranking methods.