Quick decide — A tool to aid the analytic hierarchy process for group decisions

Abstract

To take simple decisions comes naturally and does not require additional considerations but when there are multiple alternatives and criteria to be considered, a decision-making technique is required. The most studied and developed technique is the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). We focus on the practical implementation of AHP and study the set of features that are necessary when the process involves several experts together with a set of non-functional requirements, such as portability and usability. Since no existing tool satisfy all our requirements, we design and implement a new AHP tool called Quick Decide. We perform a user experiment to evaluate our tool, and find that it fulfils all our requirements. To support our usability requirements, we extend AHP with an external consistency check, which measures the distance between expert opinions to avoid results that are mathematically correct but provide no semantic value (e.g., two opposite extreme opinions).