Applications of the analytic hierarchy process have been widespread in the field of decision-making for decades. In this process, decision-makers perform pairwise comparisons to form a judgment matrix, and its principal eigenvector is used to represent the priorities. Thus it is important to evaluate the degree of inconsistency in a judgment matrix to ensure the principal eigenvector reflects the true priorities among the alternatives. This study proposes the I{sub}3 circuit method, which is based on the graph theory, with a critical inconsistent index value of 3.75 to judge and evaluate consistency or the degree of inconsistency for judgment matrices. In addition, it can also spot the matrix entries that create the most inconsistency. With these advantages of the proposed method, decision-makers can easily evaluate the pairwise comparisons of a matrix and revise some entries of the matrix toward consistency if needed.
展开▼