A Novel Discretization Based Consistency Improvement Process for Multiplicative Preference Relations in AHP

Individual consistency index is an important tool to solve decision making problems with multiplicative preference relations (also known as pairwise comparison matrices in the Analytical Hierarchy Process). This paper provides a new method to improve the consistency index, and the revised judgments for the decision maker belong to the original evaluation scale. An algorithm is designed to assist the decision maker in achieving a predefined consistency threshold. The developed approach does not depend on the consistency measure and the prioritization method. Some examples are given to illustrate effectiveness of the proposed approach. Comparing with the existing popular methods, the proposed one has two advantages: it has a smaller number of changes (in the two popular examples, only one element in the upper triangular preference relation needs to be revised); it is a heuristic approach which is much simpler than the nonlinear programming approach.