What is The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)?
The Analytic Hierarchy Process allows users to assess the relative weight of multiple criteria (or multiple alternatives against a given criterion) in an intuitive manner. Its major innovation was the introduction of pairwise comparisons. Pairwise comparisons is a metod that is informed by research showing that when quantitative ratings are unavailable, humans are still adept at recognizing whether one criteria is mor important than another. Dr. Thomas Saaty, the inventor of the AHP methodology, established a consistent way of converting such “pairwise” comparisons (X is more important than Y) into a set of numbers representing the relative priority of each of the criteria. A potential drawback with the AHP method is “Rank Reversal”. Because judgments in AHP are relative by nature, changing the set of alternatives may change the decision scores of all the alternatives. It was shown that even if a new, very poor alternative is added to a completed model, the alternatives with top scores
