Analytical hierarchy process?

Analytical Hierarchy Process

AHP is especially suitable for complex decisions which involve the comparison of decision elements which are difficult to quantify. It is based on the assumption that when faced with a complex decision the natural human reaction is to cluster the decision elements according to their common characteristics.

It involves building a hierarchy (Ranking) of decision elements and then making comparisons between each possible pair in each cluster (as a matrix). This gives a weighting for each element within a cluster (or level of the hierarchy) and also a consistency ratio (useful for checking the consistency of the data).

The Analytical Hierarchy Process Model was designed by TL Saaty as a decision making aid.

Saaty TL, 1980, The Analytic Hierarchy Process, NY, McGraw Hill.

The Analytic Hierarchy Process relies on three fundamental assumptions:

Preferences for different alternatives depend on separate criteria which can be reasoned about independently and given numerical scores.

The score for a given criteria can be calculated from sub-criteria. That is, the criteria can be arranged in a hierarchy, and the score at each level of the hierarchy can be calculated as a weighted sum of the lower level scores.

At a given level, suitable scores can be calculated from only pairwise comparisons.