The improvement of pairwise comparison method of the alternatives in the AHP

Abstract

The aim of this study was the improvement of the evaluation method of pairwise comparison for the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Analytic Network Process (ANP). In the traditional AHP and the ANP, the evaluations of pairwise comparison are carried out using a nine-stage evaluation process, and then the same process in inverse. However, in fact, the maximum evaluation value of 9 has been discovered not to have been very useful. This paper proposes the improvement of the pairwise comparison method for the AHP and a procedure that does not perform pairwise comparison for each criterion. The proposed method hypothetically offered two beneficial results. One is the ability to take into account the importance of the criteria for the evaluation of each alternative without the pairwise comparison of each criterion. The other is that the overall evaluation of the alternatives is easily obtained by the row sum of the principal eigenvector for each criterion.