ANALYTIC HIERARCHY PROCESS

Analytic Hierarchy Process



Analytic Hierarchy Process

Introduction

We are all basically conclusion makers. Everything we do attentively or automatically is the outcome of some decision. The information we gather is to help us understand occurrences, in order to develop good judgements to make decisions about these occurrences. Not all information is useful for improving our understanding and judgements. If we only make conclusions intuitively, we are inclined to accept as true that all types of data are useful and the bigger the amount, the better. But that is not true. There are many demonstrations, which display that too much information is as bad as little information. Knowing more does not assurance that we realise better as showed by some author's writing “Expert after professional missed the revolutionary implication of what Darwin had collected. Darwin, who knew less, someway understood more”.

To make a decision we need to know the problem, the need and purpose of the decision, the criteria of the decision, their subcriteria, stakeholders and groups affected and the alternative actions to take. We then try to determine the best alternate, or in the case of asset share, we need main concerns for the alternatives to assign their appropriate share of the resources. Decision making, for which we gather most of our information, has become a mathematical research today (Figuera et al., 2005). It formalises the thinking we use so that, what we have to do to make better decisions is transparent in all its aspects. We need to have some basic comprehending of this most precious process that environment endowed us with, to make it likely for us to make alternatives that help us survive. Decision making involves many criteria and subcriteria used to rank the alternatives of a decision. Not only does one need to create priorities for the alternatives with respect to the criteria or subcriteria in terms of which they need to be evaluated, but also for the criteria in terms of a higher goal, or if they depend on the alternatives, then in terms of the alternatives themselves. The criteria may be intangible, and have no measurements to serve as a guide to rank the alternatives, and creating priorities for the criteria themselves in order to weigh the priorities of the alternatives and add over all the criteria to obtain the desired overall ranks of the alternatives is a challenging task. How? In the limited space we have, we can only cover some of the essentials of multicriteria decision making, leaving it to the reader to learn more about it from the literature cited at the end of this paper. The estimation of intangible components in conclusions has for a long time, defied human understanding. Number and estimation are the centre of numbers and numbers is absolutely vital to science. So far, mathematics has assumed that all things can be assigned numbers from minus infinity to plus infinity in some way, and all mathematical modelling of reality has been described in this way by using axes ...