AHP Version 5. 1 user's manual. [Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP)]

As decisions become more and more complex, decision makers are faced with the challenge of sorting through many variables to arrive at a sound decision. The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) is a tool, that allows a systematic, logical approach to reducing complex issues into manageable pieces. The decision maker can then sort through the variables and determine to what degree a particular variable should influence the final decision. The power of the AHP as a management tool comes from the fact that it reduces complex problems to many simple pairwise decisions. Only two items need be compared against one another - a much simpler task than comparing an item to all the others simultaneously. By arranging the items that influence a decision in the form of a matrix and comparing appropriate pairs in this matrix to each other, each item can be compared with every other item. Matrix algebra can then operate on this matrix and rank each item according to its importance to the final decision.