A New Processing Approach To The AHP Group Judgment Matrices And Its Application Research

The method of analytic hierarchy process (AHP) proposed by Saaty has already been applied extensively to various complex socioeconomic problems, such as resource allocation, R&D project selection, manufacturing technology choice, strategy making and political influence analysis, etc.. The rationale of AHP is decomposing a complicated problem into a hierarchical structure composed of the overall goal level, the criteria level, the sub-criteria level, the index level and the alternative level. With the hierarchy referred, experts are asked to evaluate the relative importance of elements(also called as compared objects) at each level (except the overall goal level) with respect to each element at its upper level, and to construct sets of pairwise comparison matrices (judgment matrices). Theses matrices are finally used to derive hierarchical single ranking weights and composite ranking weights of elements, by which the ranking of alternatives to be evaluated is obtained.Constructing judgment matrices to reflect the relative importance of compared objects (e.g. alternatives in the alternative level) in the hierarchical structure is a key technical task in AHP. Since the judgment matrices are subjectively provided by experts and during the process of constructing judgment matrices experts are unavoidably affected by their knowledge and experiences, as well as the changing system environment, the judgment matrices given by experts are generally not very objective and effective. In order to enhance the accuracy of cognition to the objective system, scholars have suggested that the method of group judgment...