The state of the art development of AHP (1979-2017): A literature review with a social network analysis

Although many papers describe the evolution of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), most adopt a subjective approach. This paper examines the pattern of development of the AHP research field using social network analysis and scientometrics, and identifies its intellectual structure. The objectives are: (i) to trace the pattern of development of AHP research; (ii) to identify the patterns of collaboration among authors; (iii) to identify the most important papers underpinning the development of AHP; and (iv) to discover recent areas of interest. We analyse two types of networks: social networks, that is, co-authorship networks, and cognitive mapping or the network of disciplines affected by AHP. Our analyses are based on 8441 papers published between 1979 and 2017, retrieved from the ISI Web of Science database. To provide a longitudinal perspective on the pattern of evolution of AHP, we analyse these two types of networks during the three periods 1979?1990, 1991?2001 and 2002?2017. We provide some basic statistics on AHP journals and researchers, review the main topics and applications of integrated AHPs and provide direction for future research by highlighting some open questions

The state of the art development of AHP (1979-2017): a literature review with a social network analysis

Although many papers describe the evolution of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), most adopt a subjective approach. This paper examines the pattern of development of the AHP research field using social network analysis and scientometrics, and identifies its intellectual structure. The objectives are: (i) to trace the pattern of development of AHP research; (ii) to identify the patterns of collaboration among authors; (iii) to identify the most important papers underpinning the development of AHP; and (iv) to discover recent areas of interest. We analyse two types of networks: social networks, that is, co-authorship networks, and cognitive mapping or the network of disciplines affected by AHP. Our analyses are based on 8441 papers published between 1979 and 2017, retrieved from the ISI Web of Science database. To provide a longitudinal perspective on the pattern of evolution of AHP, we analyse these two types of networks during the three periods 1979–1990, 1991–2001 and 2002–2017. We provide some basic statistics on AHP journals and researchers, review the main topics and applications of integrated AHPs and provide direction for future research by highlighting some open questions

How to avoid ordinal violations in incomplete pairwise comparisons

Assume that some ordinal preferences can be represented by a weakly connected directed acyclic graph. The data are collected into an incomplete pairwise comparison matrix, the missing entries are estimated, and the priorities are derived from the optimally filled pairwise comparison matrix. Our paper studies whether these weights are consistent with the partial order given by the underlying graph. According to previous results from the literature, two popular procedures, the incomplete eigenvector and the incomplete logarithmic least squares methods fail to satisfy the required property. Here, it is shown that the recently introduced lexicographically optimal completion combined with any of these weighting methods avoids ordinal violation in the above setting. This finding provides a powerful argument for using the lexicographically optimal completion to determine the missing elements in an incomplete pairwise comparison matrix.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figure

A review of fuzzy AHP methods for decision-making with subjective judgements

Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is a broadly applied multi-criteria decision-making method to determine the weights of criteria and priorities of alternatives in a structured manner based on pairwise comparison. As subjective judgments during comparison might be imprecise, fuzzy sets have been combined with AHP. This is referred to as fuzzy AHP or FAHP. An increasing amount of papers are published which describe different ways to derive the weights/priorities from a fuzzy comparison matrix, but seldomly set out the relative benefits of each approach so that the choice of the approach seems arbitrary. A review of various fuzzy AHP techniques is required to guide both academic and industrial experts to choose suitable techniques for a specific practical context. This paper reviews the literature published since 2008 where fuzzy AHP is applied to decision-making problems in industry, particularly the various selection problems. The techniques are categorised by the four aspects of developing a fuzzy AHP model: (i) representation of the relative importance for pairwise comparison, (ii) aggregation of fuzzy sets for group decisions and weights/priorities, (iii) defuzzification of a fuzzy set to a crisp value for final comparison, and (iv) consistency measurement of the judgements. These techniques are discussed in terms of their underlying principles, origins, strengths and weakness. Summary tables and specification charts are provided to guide the selection of suitable techniques. Tips for building a fuzzy AHP model are also included and six open questions are posed for future work

An overview on managing additive consistency of reciprocal preference relations for consistency-driven decision making and Fusion: Taxonomy and future directions

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.The reciprocal preference relation (RPR) is a powerful tool to represent decision makers’ preferences in decision making problems. In recent years, various types of RPRs have been reported and investigated, some of them being the ‘classical’ RPRs, interval-valued RPRs and hesitant RPRs. Additive consistency is one of the most commonly used property to measure the consistency of RPRs, with many methods developed to manage additive consistency of RPRs. To provide a clear perspective on additive consistency issues of RPRs, this paper reviews the consistency measurements of the different types of RPRs. Then, consistency-driven decision making and information fusion methods are also reviewed and classified into four main types: consistency improving methods; consistency-based methods to manage incomplete RPRs; consistency control in consensus decision making methods; and consistency-driven linguistic decision making methods. Finally, with respect to insights gained from prior researches, further directions for the research are proposed