DEVELOPMENT OF THE GREY ANALYTICAL HIERARCHY PROCESS: A PRELIMINARY STUDY

摘要

The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is generally regarded as a widely applied decision theory. The major reasons behind AHP's popularity are its conceptual simplicity and its capability of handling subjective criteria by reducing complex decisions to a series of pairwise comparisons. The comparison judgments need to be expressed as ranges of numbers (or intervals) when vagueness or uncertainty in decisions is concerned. The AHP extensions incorporating interval judgments, hence, attract much interest in the literature. We report here, by applying the grey system theory, the preliminary development of the grey AHP for processing vague comparison judgments. Previous works related to preference programming, which can also handle interval judgments, are reviewed here as well. As a result, this study compared six models of AHP extensions for processing interval judgments. Based on an example problem of ranking the importance of project stages of a private-invested incinerator construction, the goal programming extension falls short of solving the example problem. The other two preference programming models are more time-consuming when compared with the grey AHP. The grey AHP, which can more simply be implemented and effectively resolve problems with vagueness, is superior to other AHP extensions.