Analytic network process

INTRODUCTION

There are at least five important criteria that a reliable decision theory should satisfy. They are: (1) having the potential to cope with full fledged complexity, including scenarios, stakeholders, criteria, subcriteria and the like; (2) validation in practice through prediction of decision outcomes in complex situations; (3) measuring intangible factors along similar lines as the theory does with tangibles; (4) including the possibility to deal with dependence and feedback among the elements of the decision; and (5) allowing for group decision making within the assumptions and mathematical workings of the theory by including the power of each member of a group in a scientifically justified way and not simply through consensus or other arbitrarily chosen criteria.

The Analytic Network Process (ANP) is a new theory that extends the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to cases of dependence and feedback and generalizes on the supermatrix approach introduced in Saaty (1980)...