Comparison of Analytic Hierarchy Process and Dominance-Based Rough Set Approach as Multi-Criteria Decision Aid Methods for the Selection of Investment Projects

Abstract

This investigation compares two multi-criteria analysis methods, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Dominance- based Rough Set Approach (DRSA), applied to the ranking of ten investment projects based on evaluation of the overall risk associated with each. AHP requires decision makers to evaluate the various elements of risk by paired comparison in terms of their impact on the element above them in the hierarchy. Each investment project is then rated in terms of each risk to produce a weighted summation used for ranking purposes. DRSA produces a ranking based on a set of decision rules that are derived from evaluation of a reduced number of reference projects well known to the decision makers. For this purpose, four reference projects were chosen from the ten. The results show that the two methods gave very similar final rankings of the ten projects. The advantage of DRSA is that the projects are evaluated using a reduced number of attributes without explicit knowledge of their impact in the hierarchy, thus eliminating a lengthy and tedious process for the decision makers.