This book offers a new logic for organizing complexity and measuring priorities. Umike traditional logic, which is basically linear, the Analytic Hierarchy Process @HP) allows one to achieve a powerful economy of thought by bringing all the factors together in a hierarchical decomposition of the system, with the objectives and functions represented in the lower levels. This is a powerful methodology for dealing with fuzziness in the evaluation of alternatives in a multiple objective decision situation. The heart of the methodology concerns the translation of fuzzy evaluations by a decision maker into a numerical scale which closely approximates his judgments. Based on the numerical scale of 1 to 9 the judgmental evaluations are translated into a reciprocal pair-wise comparison matrix.
The AHP is basically designed to: (i) set priority for the elements in each level of the hierarchy according to their impact on the criteria or objectives of the next higher level;
(ii) structure multi-person, multi-criterion, multi-tune period problems with uncertainty and risk hierarchically;
(iii) treat problems which involve dynamic judgments.
The author devotes a substantial segment of the book to examples suggesting that the AHP is a model of the way in which the human mind conceptualizes and structures complicated problems. The key issue discussed is the question of decision-making in subjective and uncertain environments. The practice of decision-making is concerned with weighting alternatives, all of which fulfill a set of desired objectives. The problem is to choose that alternative which most strongly ful8lls the entire set of objectives. The author's methodology should then be useful to model problems incorporating knowledge and judgments in such a way that the issues involved are clearly articulated, evaluated, debated, and prioritized.
The book is divided into three main parts which contain nine chapters. Part one, The Analytic Hierarchy Process, deals with the first look at hierarchies and priorities, some instructive examples, the foundations of the theory, and a formal approach to hierarchies and priorities. In Part two the author discusses the applications of the AHP to prediction, resource allocation, planning, conflict resolution and many other fields of interest. Part three is the theory portion of the book where subjects such as positive reciprocal matrices, systems with feedback, and scaling as well as multicriterion methods are discussed.