The ORʹs prize winner and the software ARGOS: how a multijudge and multicriteria ranking GDSS helps a jury to attribute a scientific award

An annual prize is attributed to the best studentʹs final work by the Belgian Operations Research Society. In 1992, the author happened to be a member of the jury designated by this Society to evaluate the candidates and to elect the best one. The three others members of the jury were kindly convinced by the author to use a multiple criteria and multijudge procedure to discriminate the eight candidates qualities, parallely to their more classical global evaluation. In order to facilitate the procedure, a group decision support system (GDSS) was fed by four evaluation matrices given by the team, who defined a common set of criteria completed by an overall direct evaluation. The purposes of this paper are to describe this real-world experiment and to present a multiple criteria procedure of candidates’ selection and ranking supported by the software ARGOS (acronym of aid to the ranking to be made by a group of decision makers using an outranking support). This GDSS allows a team of decision makers to run one or several releases of ELECTRE and PROMETHEE methods of preference aggregation in order to deal with the problems of sorting, ranking and of electing the best candidate. A first release of ARGOS is able to deal with the two phases of a group decision process: the multiple criteria preference aggregation performed by each member of the group in the first phase, and, in the second phase, the comparison of results issued from the application of several functions of social choices for supporting the deliberation process of the group, e.g. Borda or Condorcet functions, the Raynaudʹs prudent orders and some rank disagreements functions. In its second release, ARGOS has been enriched by the addition of JUDGES, the name for another GDSS which compares the rankings given by the teamʹs members and the candidates’ distributions of ranks, provides advices for seeking a consensus, and supports voting simulations.