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This paper looks into the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) of the field of the applications based on DA techniques; focusing especially on MAVT. The need for best practices and bias-resistant analysis procedures is pointed out. In most application papers there are no reports on the verification or testing of the procedures used. The Internet provides great opportunities in the delivery of DA software and e-learning material. Public sites such as Decisionarium ( www.decisionarium.hut.fi ) provide encouragement and a low entry level to try value tree analysis in new applications. There are also great opportunities in reaching out the other MCDA communities such as AHP practitioners. Today the need and demand for decision support is perhaps growing most rapidly in environmental problems. A clear trend is also the integration of DA into GIS and other models. Many of the applications are now published in non-OR/MS subject area journals.

AbstractDecisionarium (www.decisionarium.hut.fi) is the first public site for interactive multicriteria decision support with tools for individual decision‐making as well as for group collaboration and negotiation. Web‐HIPRE (www.hipre.hut.fi) supports value tree and AHP analysis including group models. The RICH methodology (www.rich.hut.fi) allows the decision maker to provide incomplete ordinal preference statements when considering the relative importance of attributes in a value tree. Opinions‐Online (www.opinion.hut.fi) is a platform for surveys voting and group collaboration. There are different ways for voting, multiattribute scoring, surveys as well as interactive viewing of the results. Joint Gains (www.jointgains.hut.fi) applies the method of improving directions to support multiparty negotiations in a multicriteria setting. Smart Swaps offers an implementation of the even swaps procedure (www.smart‐swaps.hut.fi). All of the tools above are web‐based, so global interaction is natural and links can be utilized for multimedia information support. Decisionarium also offers access to complete e‐learning modules (www.dm.hut.fi) based on the use of the software. There are also illustrative powerpoint presentations and additional Windows software WINPRE and PRIME‐Decisions for value tree analysis under incomplete information. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper introduces an approach to support different phases of the even swaps process by preference programming, which is a framework for modeling incomplete information within multiattribute value theory (MAVT). In the approach, the even swaps process is carried out as usual, but in parallel, the evolution of the preferences of the decision maker is modeled with preference programming. With this model, we can provide information to the even swaps process to help identify practically dominated alternatives, and to find applicable candidate attributes for the next even swap. The approach does not compromise the original idea of an easy-to-use process. Our Smart-Swaps web software is used to demonstrate the method in practice.