A Handbook on Multi-Attribute Decision-Making Methods

3Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)

3.1 Introduction

A skeptical mind might argue that the philosophical foundation of multicriteria, in general, and multiattribute decision‐making (MADM) process, is similar to any other decision‐making process seeking to achieve participant satisfaction and ensure the interest of the stakeholders. There may be some truth in this unifying view of decision‐making because a multi attribute decision‐making process can be transformed into a single criterion problem with the objective of optimizing the stakeholders’ utility. This viewpoint, however, is flawed because stakeholders’ interests may differ from one another and representing their goals with a single mathematical objective function is a moot attempt. Furthermore, even in cases with a solitary stakeholder, guaranteeing the satisfaction of the beneficiary may, in turn, relay on underlying objectives or evaluating criteria. These criteria may be of conflicting natures and are, in all likelihood, of different importance to the stakeholders. Consequently, such reasoning would lead the decision‐maker back were the argument started, where the interest of stakeholders would be represented by evaluation criteria, and the objective is to forage these criteria to find the ideal set of solution(s) that would best represent the interest of the participants in the decision‐making process.

The process of decision‐making is a subjective procedure, which relies in part on the cognitive understanding of the ...