A decision support system for animated film selection based on a multi-criteria aggregation of referees’ ordinal preferences

This paper presents a decision support system devoted to the selection of films for the International Animated Film Festival organized at Annecy, France, every year. It deals with the representation and aggregation of referees’ preferences along predefined criteria in addition to their overall selection point of view. The practical requirements associated with this application (often encountered in social or cultural areas as well) are: a common ordinal scale for the criteria scores, a procedure to deal with inconsistencies between criteria and overall scores, explanation tools of each referee’s preference model in order to facilitate the deliberation process and also to argument the selection decision. The processing of referees’ preferences is achieved thanks to a recent method which consists in finding a generalized mean aggregation operator representing the preferences of a referee, in a finite ordinal scale context. The method allows to deal with consistency conditions on referees’ behaviour in order to highlight the criteria or pair of criteria which are the most influential for each of the referees. All the functionalities have been implemented in an interactive decision software that facilitates a shared selection decision. Results issued from the 2007 selection are presented and analysed from the preference representation and processing point of view.