Introduction and Fundamentals

In a world whose complexity is rapidly growing, making the best decisions becomes an increasingly demanding task for managers of companies, governmental agencies and many other decision and policy makers. In recent years, this has gone arm-in-arm with the growth of what are now known as decision analytics methodologies. Namely, decision makers are more reluctant to make gut decisions based of feelings and hunches, and instead prefer to use analytic and quantitative tools, and base and analyze their decisions on a solid ground. Many methods stemming from applied mathematics and operations research proved useful to help decision makers making informed decisions, and among these methods there are also those requiring, as inputs, subjective judgments from a decision maker or an expert. It is in this context that the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) becomes a useful tool for analyzing decisions.