Relative evaluation of criteria for cooperative Interval AHP in group decision making

Abstract

In the well-known multiple criteria approach, AHP (Analytic hierarchy process), an expert is required to give the comparisons on criteria and those on alternatives under all criteria and then the decision problem is explored completely. However, it is time-consuming task for an expert to complete the required comparisons since the numbers of comparisons increase drastically as the numbers of criteria and alternatives. The purpose of this paper is to reduce such burdens of experts by using Interval AHP. In case of a group of experts, some find the criteria that are more importance than the others. Then, it is enough for an expert to evaluate under some assigned criteria instead of all criteria. Furthermore, under the assigned criteria he/she does not necessarily make to give the comparisons without confidence in Interval AHP, since it is formulated as a LP problem. The proposed method helps to practice in real situations by reducing some burdens on experts.