The painting activity is one of the most complex and important activities in automobile manufacturing. The inherent complexity of the painting activity and the frequent need for repainting usually turn the painting process into a bottleneck in automobile assembly plants, which is reflected in higher operating costs and longer overall cycle times. One possible approach for optimizing the performance of the paint shop is to improve the efficiency of the color planning. This can be accomplished by evaluating the relative merits of a set of vehicle painting plans. Since this problem has a multicriteria nature, we resort to the multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) methodology to tackle it. A recent trend in the MCDA field is the development of hybrid approaches that are used to achieve operational synergies between different methods. Here we apply, for the first time, an integrated approach that combines the strengths of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the Preference Ranking Organization METHod for Enrichment Evaluations (PROMETHEE), aided by Geometrical Analysis for Interactive Aid (GAIA), to the problem of assessing alternative vehicle painting plans. The management of the assembly plant found the results of value and is currently using them in order to schedule the painting activities such that an enhancement of the operational efficiency of the paint shop is obtained. This efficiency gain has allowed the management to bid for a new automobile model to be assembled at this specific plant.Keywords: AHP; automobile paint shop; GAIA; multicriteria decision analysis; PROMETHEE evaluation of painting plans would be simpler if the assessment was based solely on one criterion (for instance, reduction of paint consumption (PC) levels). However, the appropriate treatment of this problem should embrace the inherent complexity of the painting system by taking into account all the relevant criteria affecting the decision. These criteria can be of qualitative or quantitative nature and they reflect different dimensions of the decision process (e.g., technological, economical, and environmental dimensions), which influence the decision-making process in various degrees. Besides, they are often conflicting since there exists no alternative optimizing all the criteria at the same time. The conflicting nature of criteria requires a trade-off between them. The problem of evaluating painting plans is characterized by all the aforementioned features thus having a multicriteria nature. For this reason, we resort to an MCDA methodology to address this problem.The application of MCDA to the problem of evaluating alternative painting plans in automobile assembly plants was first proposed by Oliveira et al. (2014). Besides introducing this new paint shop problem, the authors performed an assessment of a set of painting plans using two distinct MCDA methods: the AHP and the less-known MMASSI (multicriteria methodology for supporting the selection of information systems) method (Pereira and Sameiro de Carvalho, 2005). These method...