The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) has been one of the foremost
mathematical methods for decision making with multiple criteria and has
been widely studied in the operations research literature as well as
applied to solve countless real-world problems. This book is meant to
introduce and strengthen the readers' knowledge of the AHP, no matter
how familiar they may be with the topic.
This book provides a concise, yet self-contained, introduction to the
AHP that uses a novel and more pedagogical approach. It begins with an
introduction to the principles of the AHP, covering the critical points
of the method, as well as some of its applications. Next, the book
explores further aspects of the method, including the derivation of the
priority vector, the estimation of inconsistency, and the use of AHP for
group decisions. Each of these is introduced by relaxing initial
assumptions. Furthermore, this booklet covers extensions of AHP, which
are typically neglected in elementary expositions of the methods. Such
extensions concern different numerical representations of preferences
and the interval and fuzzy representations of preferences to account for
uncertainty. During the whole exposition, an eye is kept on the most
recent developments of the method.