ANALYTICAL HIERARCHY PROCESS (AHP) AND ANALYTIC NETWORK PROCESS METHODS AND THEIR APPLICATIONS: A TWENTY YEAR REVIEW FROM 2000-2019

Abstract

This research aims to analyze a literature review of publications that have incorporated the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Analytic Network Process (ANP) methods. The AHP and ANP methods have contributed to decision-making in complex situations in recent years and possess widespread applications. Such applications are spread over the years with publications in various major areas such as engineering/technology/applied sciences, social sciences, health sciences, and environmental studies. These two methods provide multiple solutions to researchers in these fields, which is why they are being considered in the current study. For this purpose, data was collected from 920 research papers after a vigorous literature review using different search engines. This paper aims to classify the publications on AHP and ANP methods from the years 2000 to 2019 to identify recognized journals based on their indexes. Furthermore, another objective of this study is to compare total publications by year, publications by field by year, and lastly, observe the distribution by country of the studies. This paper concludes that the highest number of publications are from Turkey, and the highest number of publications used AHP method applications in every category. Most of the publications belonged to the technical fields, followed by social sciences. The study concluded that the AHP method is more widely preferred by researchers in almost every field and application because it tends to produce more accurate results than the ANP.