This chapter provides an overview of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), which is a systematic procedure for representing the elements of any problem hierarchically. It organizes the basic rationality by breaking down a problem into its smaller constituent parts and then guides decision makers through a series of pair-wise comparison judgments to express the relative strength or intensity of impact of the elements in the hierarchy. These judgments are then translated to numbers. The AHP includes procedures and principles used to synthesize the many judgments to derive priorities among criteria and subsequently for alternative solutions. It is useful to note that the numbers thus obtained are ratio scale estimates and correspond to so-called hard numbers. Problem solving is a process of setting priorities in steps. One step decides on the most important elements of a problem, another on how best to repair, replace, test, and evaluate the elements, and another on how to implement the solution and measure performance.

The Analytic Hierarchy Process

A Scaling Method for Priorities in Hierarchical Structures

Fuzzy Set Theory - And Its Applications, Third Edition is a textbook for courses in fuzzy set theory. It can also be used as an introduction to the subject. The character of a textbook is balanced with the dynamic nature of the research in the field by including many useful references to develop a deeper understanding among interested readers. The book updates the research agenda (which has witnessed profound and startling advances since its inception some 30 years ago) with chapters on possibility theory, fuzzy logic and approximate reasoning, expert systems, fuzzy control, fuzzy data analysis, decision making and fuzzy set models in operations research. All chapters have been updated. Exercises are included.

https://www.springer.com/productFlyer_978-0-7923-7435-0.pdf?SGWID=0-0-1297-33300503-0

Fuzzy Set Theory - and Its Applications

I have developed "tennis elbow" from lugging this book around the past four weeks, but it is worth the pain, the effort, and the aspirin. It is also worth the (relatively speaking) bargain price. Including appendixes, this book contains 894 pages of text. The entire panorama of the neural sciences is surveyed and examined, and it is comprehensive in its scope, from genomes to social behaviors. The editors explicitly state that the book is designed as "an introductory text for students of biology, behavior, and medicine," but it is hard to imagine any audience, interested in any fragment of neuroscience at any level of sophistication, that would not enjoy this book. The editors have done a masterful job of weaving together the biologic, the behavioral, and the clinical sciences into a single tapestry in which everyone from the molecular biologist to the practicing psychiatrist can find and appreciate his or

Principles of Neural Science

How to make a decision: The analytic hierarchy process

Our purpose in this chapter is to explore, through an example, the roles of technical competence and of behavior in predicting the outcome of a competitive situation. Of course, factors arising from uncontrollable natural events (such as bad weather) and from human intervention (such as referee error) could have a marked effect on the outcome. In most competition, however, an effort is usually made to minimize the effect of natural causes to avoid unfair outside intervention.

Hierarchical analysis of behavior in competition: Prediction in chess

The purpose of this note is to comment on the artificiality of using known scales of measurement (or conveniently improvised numbers) to make decisions. In particular, the pitfalls of trying to please the decision maker and of using normalization as a number crunching tool are discussed. Finally, an example is given to show what is needed to develop a workable and theoretically sound theory for multi-criteria decisions and to show that the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) meets these demands.

Thomas L. Saaty

Papers

Hierarchical analysis of behavior in competition: Prediction in chess

Decision Making, Scaling, and Number Crunching

An innovative orders-of-magnitude approach to AHP-based mutli-criteria decision making: Prioritizing divergent intangible humane acts

The analytic hierarchy process and human resource allocation: Half the story

Progress in Operations Research.