Consistency Indices in Analytic Hierarchy Process: A Review

Abstract

A well-regarded as well as powerful method named the ‘analytic hierarchy process’ (AHP) uses mathematics and psychology for making and analysing complex decisions. This article aims to present a brief review of the consistency measure of the judgments in AHP. Judgments should not be random or illogical. Several researchers have developed different consistency measures to identify the rationality of judgments. This article summarises the consistency measures which have been proposed so far in the literature. Moreover, this paper describes briefly the functional relationships established in the literature among the well-known consistency indices. At last, some thoughtful research directions that can be helpful in further research to develop and improve the performance of AHP are provided as well.

Application and Research of Enterprise Strategic Management Based on FAHP Model in Management Accounting

“…Analytic hierarchy process [9] (AHP) was formally proposed by American operations researcher Professor Thomas L. Saaty in the 1970s as a system evaluation method that combines qualitative and quantitative analysis methods. By decomposing a complex problem into multiple levels and elements, comparing the elements of each level, establishing a judgment matrix according to a certain scale, and calculating the maximum characteristic roots of the judgment matrix and its corresponding characteristic vectors, the weights of the importance of different solutions can be obtained, providing a basis for selecting the best solution.…”

Analytical hierarchy process for sustainable agriculture: An overview

“…Thomas Saaty developed AHP in the year 1970 [5] . For the last forty years, it has been regarded as a widely used and accepted tool to deal with complex decision-making problems for various fields [6 , 7] . It provides support to the decision-makers so that they can select the best alternative that depends on multiple criteria and sub-criteria [8] .…”

“…In real world problem, it is not always possible to find the perfect judgments and hence, a consistent pairwise comparison matrix after performing the pairwise comparisons is needed [7] . Therefore, another important goal is to acquire a positive reciprocal matrix which is not very far from some consistent positive reciprocal matrix.…”

A State-of-the-Art Survey on Analytical Hierarchy Process Applications in Sustainable Development

“…If there is a transitivity rule for all comparisons, a matrix 𝐴 is said to be consistent. The main advantage of AHP is that it permits inconsistency in the judgements, which can be further measured and helps decision-makers to revise his judgements (Pant et al, 2022).…”