The
Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is a multi-criteria decision-making approach and was introduced by Saaty (1977
and 1994). The AHP has attracted
the interest of many researchers mainly due to the nice mathematical properties of the
method
and the fact that the required input data are rather easy to obtain. The AHP is a decision support tool which can
be
used to solve complex decision problems. It uses a multi-level hierarchical structure of objectives, criteria, subcriteria,
and
alternatives. The pertinent data are derived by using a set of pairwise comparisons. These comparisons are used to
obtain
the weights of importance of the decision criteria, and the relative performance measures of the alternatives in terms
of
each individual decision criterion. If the comparisons are not perfectly consistent, then it provides a mechanism for
improving consistency.