Analyse multicritère : Étude de comparaison des méthodes existantes en vue d'une application en analyse de cycle de vie

Life cycle analysis is an environmental concept that is more and more applied in companies that take care of environment. It does not replace environmental laws, but it gives managers a mean to compare different alternatives (which can be goods, processes, services, etc.). Lately this concept has been integrated in environmental ISO norms. However it is still a subject where research is quite active (definition of impacts, weighting, etc. ). One problem for life cycle analysis is to combine the different indicators and aggregate them, to get a ranking of all the alternatives.
Multicriteria analysis is an older concept , but its framework fits the methodology of life cycle analysis. Moreover it is also a tool for managers to select an alternative. Many methods have been proposed to aggregate the performances of an alternative relatively to a criterion.
The first two parts consist in a presentation of some multicriteria decision making methods, and a brief presentation of life cycle analysis. Then we evaluate what could multicriteria analysis bring to life cycle analysis, and what are the obstacles for the application of multicriteria analysis to life cycle analysis.
The basic idea is to apply multicriteria analysis to life cycle analysis. Some papers have already been written, proposing rules to get coherent criteria, etc. But among the many existing multicriteria methods, we still don't know which one to choose. There are many ways to aggregate indicators and the multicriteria method chosen should be evaluated on some points : is it compensatory ?, does it provide a real number as a result ?, etc. We think that there is no unique method which can be applied to all problems, but we should certainly choose the most suitable method for a specific problem or context. In this paper some methods will be evaluated with their associated softwares, using life cycle analysis data.
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