Mello, João Carlos Correia Baptista Soares de (Univ. Federal Fluminense. Dep. Eng. Produção);

Gomes, Eliane Gonçalves (Embrapa);

Gomes, Luiz Flavio Autran Monteiro (Ibmec Business School. Faculdades Ibmec);

Biondi Neto, Luiz (IDep. Eng. Eletr. e Telecom. Univ. Est. Rio de Janeiro);

Meza, Lidia Angulo (Univ. Federal Fluminense. Dep. Ciência dos Materiais).

Pesquisa Operacional; volume 25, número 3, páginas 313-330. Dezembro 2005.

class division;

ELECTRE;

intransitivity;

airports.

In airport studies it is quite common to define categories of airports according to their sizes. Regarding size, each airport is usually classified according to only one criterion, although the problem of determining the airport size is clearly a multicriteria one. This paper employs a new approach for classifying airports according to their sizes by making use of a variant of the multicriteria method ELECTRE I. The new approach is applied to evaluate the size of Portuguese airports and to allocate these airport to well-defined size categories. The amount of cargo and the number of passengers, as well as number of aircraft landing in the airport, are the used criteria. The obtained results are compared with two additional models based on weighted sum and data envelopment analysis.