SOCRATES Manual

SOCRATES (SOcial multi-CRiteria AssessmenT of European policieS) is a software tool explicitly designed for impact assessment problems. Three main components constitute the core of SOCRATES: multi-criteria, equity and sensitivity analyses. The impact matrix may include quantitative (including also stochastic and/or fuzzy uncertainty) and qualitative (ordinal and/or linguistic) measurements of the performance of an alternative with respect to an evaluation criterion. It supplies a ranking of the alternatives according to the set of evaluation criteria by using a non-compensatory mathematical aggregation rule. Equity analysis requires as input a set of social actors and the impact of the alternatives on these social actors. The objective of sensitivity analysis is to check if the ranking provided is stable and to determine which of the input parameters influence more the model output. The entire information produced by local and global sensitivity analyses is synthesised into simple graphics.