A note on ELECTRE TRI-nB with few limiting profiles

Abstract

ELECTRE TRI-nB is a method designed to sort alternatives evaluated on several attributes into ordered categories. It is an extension of ELECTRE TRI-B that uses several limiting profiles, instead of one, to delimit each category. In a previous paper we have characterized the ordered partitions that can be obtained with ELECTRE TRI-nB, using a simple axiom called linearity. The simplicity of this characterization crucially depends on the possibility to use as many limiting profiles as we like to delimit a category. This is not completely realistic and there is a need to study models in which the number of limiting profiles delimiting each category is restricted. This note starts the investigation of such models. We specifically study the case of models using one or two profiles together with an outranking relation based on unanimity.