Management decision making by the analytic hierarchy process: A proposed modification for large-scale problems

Frequently, management decision making problems involve multiple criteria/objectives/attributes. Over the years, many quantitative methods have been developed to facilitate making rational decisions involving multiple criteria. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is, in general, regarded as one of the most successful techniques to solve decision making problems involving multiple criteria. In AHP, the decision maker starts by constructing the overall hierarchy of the decision problem. The hierarchy consists of criteria, subcriteria and alternatives of the decision making problem. A number of pairwise comparison matrices are formed in order to derive weights of the criteria and the local weights of the alternatives. Subsequently, the principle of hierarchical composition is used to determine the global weights of the alternatives. The alternative with the highest global weight is selected as the best alternative. The drawback of the traditional AHP is that it requires a large number of pairwaise comparisons, especially in the presence of a large number of criteria. The present empirical study attempts to investigate the possibility of eliminating insignificant criteria in order to reduce AHP computational time. Using the Expert Choice software, findings confirm that criteria that carry comparatively lesser weights can be excluded from the hierarchy and thereby the total time required for making the pairwise comparisons can be reduced drastically. To solve large-scale enterprise multi-criteria decision making problems (that involve large number of criteria) by AHP, it is proposed that at the very outset, decision makers can apply nominal group technique to identify the insignificant criteria. These criteria can be dropped from subsequent analysis and this exclusion will not affect the final decision significantly. This proposed methodology is expected to enhance the applicability of AHP in solving various kinds of larger sized multi-criteria decision making problems in any enterprise.Multiple criteria decision making, Analytic hierarchy process, Nominal group technique, Large-scale problems, International business

A Route Confidence Evaluation Method for Reliable Hierarchical Text Categorization

Hierarchical Text Categorization (HTC) is becoming increasingly important with the rapidly growing amount of text data available in the World Wide Web. Among the different strategies proposed to cope with HTC, the Local Classifier per Node (LCN) approach attains good performance by mirroring the underlying class hierarchy while enforcing a top-down strategy in the testing step. However, the problem of embedding hierarchical information (parent-child relationship) to improve the performance of HTC systems still remains open. A confidence evaluation method for a selected route in the hierarchy is proposed to evaluate the reliability of the final candidate labels in an HTC system. In order to take into account the information embedded in the hierarchy, weight factors are used to take into account the importance of each level. An acceptance/rejection strategy in the top-down decision making process is proposed, which improves the overall categorization accuracy by rejecting a few percentage of samples, i.e., those with low reliability score. Experimental results on the Reuters benchmark dataset (RCV1- v2) confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, compared to other state-of-the art HTC methods

A Hierarchical Model and Analysis of Factors Affecting The Adoption of Timber as A Bridge Material

The Analytical Hierarchy Process was used to characterize the bridge material selection decisions of highway engineers and local highway officials across the United States. State Department of Transportation engineers, private consulting engineers, and local highway officials were personally interviewed in Mississippi, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin to identify how various factors determine their choice of a bridge material. The Analytical Hierarchy Process was used to quantify this subjective data and to model the selection decision for different groups of decision-makers. Prestressed concrete was the material of choice in the majority of cases. This was followed by reinforced concrete, steel, and timber. Local highway officials chose timber more often than did either group of engineers. These results indicate that timber will remain a niche market for bridge applications

A multi-criteria approach to local tax planning

A city tax model based on the analytic hierarchy process is developed. This model allows city officials to explicitly take into account the existence of multiple decision criteria in selecting new tax options. Opinions from tax experts are used to relate tax plans to decision criteria. The paper explores the feasibility of applying commonly available decision tools to facilitate and improve decision making in local government

E-Cognocracy and the Participation of Immigrants in E-Governance

This paper develops a new approach for a political support system related to the integration of immigrants using e-governance. Through the Internet the participation of immigrants is possible in both societies, the original and the new one, and at the three different levels: local, regional and national. Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), we discuss how to consider immigrants as e-citizens and, through a questionnaire, and we measure the relative importance of these attributes for party decision makers. The focus of this paper is less on technological aspects of e-decision making, or the diffusion of knowledge and e-learning; Rather on the new aspects as how to integrate immigrants in e-governance. The mission is to increase the society-oriented knowledge derived from participatory decision-making and to increase the background and the scope of the learning process that goes along with the modification of the initial preferences in the interactive political resolution process.E-cognocracy, E-democracy, E-citizen, E-participation, Immigration, Knowledge society

Delegation, Knowledge Integration, and Cooperation: How to Solve Problems of Coordination in Structural Fund Programs. Findings From Comparative Case Studies in the South of Italy

European cohesion policies are increasingly relying on grassroots networks tapping into tacit knowledge and participatory decision-making processes. Regional governments delegate their decision making power to local institutions with the assumption that local agents possess both contextual knowledge and political legitimacy to integrate different policy measures in a cooperative fashion. Delegation of decision making power is therefore presumed to minimize the unintended or conflicting outcomes emerging, for instance, when environmental protection and infrastructure building are not designed consistently to local contextual needs nor are these pursued through a cooperative effort of local networks of actors. Different agents, including resource users and government agencies try to work together to resolve shared dilemmas of coordination, as an increasingly common alternative to centralized institutions. Coordination consists of managing interdependencies among multiple individuals or organizations involved in the overall program or project management. Several studies classify different types of coordination mechanisms, including standards, hierarchy, targets or plans, slack resources, vertical information systems, direct contact, liaison roles, task forces, and integrating roles. Other ways of classifying coordination include formal impersonal, formal interpersonal, and informal interpersonal; non-coordination, standards, schedules and plans, mutual adjustment, and teams; task-task, task-resource, and resource-resource coordination; vertical and horizontal coordination; coordination by programming and by feedback; and coordination by standards, plans, and mutual adjustment. Building upon a current field research in four regions of the South of Italy, this paper examines how coordination occurs across local development programs, which are embedded within multilevel governance structures and relations. The paper presents a number of cases of local collaborations in which large numbers of local actors representing a wide range of contending groups have, with the help of mediating institutions, worked out agreements for integrating development programs. In some circumstances, specific coordination mechanisms encouraged consensus building offering all relevant groups the knowledge and skills needed to participate in these negotiations. In other circumstances, though, delegation of decision making power opened the door for opportunistic participation, lacking vision and trust for mutual cooperation.

Analytic Hierarchy Process for Stakeholder Participation in Integrated Water Resources Management

This paper focuses on the applied of the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) with Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) to develop the model for water resources management in the Pranburi watershed by the stakeholder participation. The structure of the hierarchy model in Pranburi watershed was developed by the experts based on IWRM and classified in 4 criteria, 15 sub-criteria, and 3 alternatives. Questionnaire method is the tool for obtaining a score to the comparison between pairs of criteria by the representatives in the community. The finding revealed that the importance of criteria is the environmental factors. The highest ranked of the alternative is the strategy of watershed participation. These results implied that the community focused the stakeholder participation based on the decision-making process for water resources in Pranburi watershed. This research clearly presented the capability of AHP approach can integrate with an IWRM principle for water resources planning. The AHP approach can demonstrate the community representative’s relevant data before making the decision and reduce bias on decision making by applying pairwise comparison of AHP technique. More importantly, the government should support the collaborative with local officer and community in the decision making policy on water resources planning.This paper focuses on the applying the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) to develop a model for water resource management in the Pranburi watershed by using stakeholder participation. The hierarchy model structure of the Pranburi watershed was developed by the experts based on IWRM and classified into 4 criteria, 15 sub-criteria, and 3 alternatives. The questionnaire method was the tool used for obtaining a weighing for comparison between the pairs of criteria obtained from community representatives. The finding revealed that the important criteria are the environmental factors. The highest ranked of the alternatives is the watershed planning strategy. These results implied that community focused stakeholder participation in the decision-making process for water resources in Pranburi watershed gave a positive outcome. This research clearly presented the capability of the AHP approach integrates with IWRM principle for water resource planning. The AHP approach can analyze the community representative’s relevant data before decision making, by applying pairwise comparison of the AHP technique, can reduce bias during decision making. More importantly, the government should support collaboration with local officers and the community in the decision making policy on water resource planning