Papers

Wei Gu, Thomas Saaty, Lirong Wei
Journal: International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making
Technological innovation as one of the most important competitive strategies for companies has attracted the attentions of companies and governments. In this paper, we present an evaluation method based on data and judgments to rank the technological innovation capability and technological innova...

Thomas Saaty, H. J. Zoffer, Lirong Wei
Journal: European Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics
How satisfied is each of us with the fulfillment of his life? In this paper after a thorough search of the literature about satisfaction, 58 criteria and subcriteria related to satisfaction or fulfillment were identified and arranged in a hierarchic structure. A process of prioritization known as...

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas
Journal: European Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics
The nervous system uses its own kind of mathematical function patterns for both external and internal realities. The conscious part of the nervous system is there to respond to what happens outside by regulating externally received information signals from the senses and the skin and muscles of t...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Neural Networks
This paper is concerned with the firing of many neurons and the synthesis of these firings to develop functions and their transforms which relate chemical and electrical phenomena to the physical world. The density of such functions in the most general spaces that we encounter allows us to use li...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Neural Networks
This paper is concerned with understanding synthesis of electric signals in the neural system based on making pairwise comparisons. Fundamentally, every person and every animal are born with the talent to compare stimuli from things that share properties in space or over time. Comparisons always ...

Thomas Saaty, Elena Rokou
Journal: World Patent Information
In this paper we consider many intangible criteria that influence the priorities and ranks of inventions as they contribute to human welfare, by using the Analytic Hierarchy Process. We apply the ideas to evaluate a number of modern inventions along with a few old ones. Both the categories of inv...

Lirong Wei, Thomas Saaty
Journal: International Journal of the Analytic Hierarchy Process
This paper is an analysis of Brexit, and asked the question, Should the UK have Brexited the European Union? We use the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to model the decision based on Benefit-Opportunities-Costs and Risks (BOCR). The AHP structure considers various factors that may be taken into...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: International Journal of the Analytic Hierarchy Process
This paper presents five different ways to establish weights for the criteria that govern making comparisons. Four of these can be done in the context of the AHP, but the fifth and most reliable one is obtained by using the ANP.

Thomas Saaty, Lei Zhang
Journal: International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making
There are many examples of successful application of the famous Bayes’ theorem to forecast the outcome of causes or influences of events. However, there are also many examples of failures of just using probabilities and statistics without also using judgments in each particular application. This ...

Thomas Saaty, Konrad Kułakowski
Journal: eprint arXiv:1605.05777
The AHP/ANP are multicriteria decision-making theories that deal with both hierarchic structures when the criteria are independent of the alternatives and with networks when there is any dependence within and between elements of the decision. Both of them have been repeatedly used in practice by ...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Fundamenta Informaticae
One often assumes that comparisons are discrete and carried out in a matrix of numbers. However, our eyes and other senses perform comparisons in a continuous way by making many simultaneously. Here the mathematics of pairwise comparisons is generalized to the continuous case. It is more likely t...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
Where there is structure, the parts of the structure must function together with a degree of consistency and purpose. Specifically, I am thinking of dynamic systems in which there are action and reaction among the parts and their functions and also friction and resistance. Natural systems, such a...

Thomas Saaty, Mujgan Sagir Ozdemir
Journal: International Journal of the Analytic Hierarchy Process
In this paper we consider the many intangible criteria that influence the outcome of the Summer Olympics by using the Analytic Network Process, and apply the ideas to evaluate the medals won and the country scores in the 2012 London Olympics. Both the categories of games and the events in each ga...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: International Journal of Strategic Decision Sciences
Marijuana has been regarded as an evil in our society because of abuse and addiction. However, its legalization and use in several states have shown that from the standpoint of its benefits, opportunities, costs and risks (BOCR) the overall decision should be to legalize it in our greater society...

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas, H. J. Zoffer
Journal: Decision Analytics
While the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has raged for decades, in all of its ramifications there has never been a totally structured or scientific approach to the conflict with all of its details. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) approaches the problem along these lines. There are a plethora o...

Thomas Saaty, Mujgan Sagir Ozdemir
Journal: Journal of Urban Management
This paper describes various possibilities of the cities of futures considering various constraints and demand of society, environment and geography. The need for future cities arises because of the rapid growth in population and thereby causing a decline in the living standards. In the United St...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: International Journal of the Analytic Hierarchy Process
Can all the methods people invented to do decision making be right all the time? Maybe for making trivial decisions, but not in the case of those that involve dependence and feedback and need complete analysis of benefits, opportunities, costs and risks to get an overall justifiable outcome.

Thomas Saaty, H. J. Zoffer
Journal: Notices of the AMS
The purpose of this paper is to show how the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) applies mathematics to deal with the most complex problems of the world in a comprehensive and holistic way—in this case the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This process has been helpful in finding solutions to some of th...

Thomas Saaty, Daji Ergu
Decision makers often face complicated decision problems with intangible and conflicting criteria. Numerous multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods have been proposed to handle the measurement of the priorities of conflicting tangible/intangible criteria and in turn use them to choose the b...

Valentina Ferretti, Thomas Saaty
Journal: International Journal of the Analytic Hierarchy Process
The following interview aims to stimulate the discussion about the key characteristics of Multicriteria Analysis techniques. In particular, the interview will work through the conceptual lens of decision processes taking place in the field of urban and territorial transformations.

Thomas Saaty, Mujgan Sagir Ozdemir, Jennifer Shang
We propose an innovative AHP-based model to assess the severity of the harms a criminal commits to society in a comprehensive and coherent way. Different from the traditional approach of structuring alternatives into one level, we organize the alternatives into multiple levels of that hierarchy. ...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Symp. Anal. Hierarchy Process
To change this world from its primitive habit of using words and language to arrive at decisions by making tradeoffs which require the use of numbers, we need to work hard to promote this way of thinking to teach the whole world and its politicians how to measure the intangibles involved in the d...

Qingxing Dong, Thomas Saaty
Journal: Journal of Systems Science and Systems Engineering
In group decision making, a certain degree of consensus is necessary to derive a meaningful and valid outcome. This paper proposes a consensus reaching model for a group by using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). It supports people to improve their group consensus level through an updating of...

Thomas Saaty, Mujgan Sagir Ozdemir
Journal: Annals of Data Science
This paper briefly examines the question of how many judges are needed to obtain valid and consistent judgments when using the analytic hierarchy process. It turns out that if a judge is experienced and well versed in an area, he can be sufficient to provide the judgments instead of diluting his ...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Axioms
The rules of logic are nearly 2500 years old and date back to Plato and Aristotle who set down the three laws of thought: identity, non-contradiction, and excluded middle. The use of language and logic has been adequate for us to develop mathematics, prove theorems, and create scientific knowledg...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: International Journal of the Analytic Hierarchy Process
It is known and has been mathematically proven that the principal eigenvector is necessary for deriving priorities from judgments in the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). According to the work of Oskar Perron, the principal eigenvector can be obtained as the limiting power of a positive matrix. I...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Operations Research
This paper presents a summary of the discrete mathematical part of my work, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and its generalization to dependence and feedback, the Analytic Network Process (ANP), for measuring tangible and intangible factors, particularly as applied to decision making. The fa...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Notices of the American Mathematical Society
Nearly all of us have been brought up to believe that clear-headed logical thinking is our only sure way to face and solve problems. But experience suggests that logical thinking is not natural to us. Indeed, we have to practice, and for a long time, before we can do it well. Since complex proble...

Andrew Blair, Gershon Mandelker, Thomas Saaty, Rozann Whitaker
Journal: Socio-Economic Planning Sciences
This paper describes a forecast, performed in December 2008, of the time of the recovery of the U.S. economy from the contraction that began in December 2007. As in two earlier papers, the forecast uses an expert judgment approach, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), within the framework of dec...

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas
Journal: Social Choice and Welfare
Preferences in Arrow’s conditions are ordinal. Here we show that when intensity of preference represented by reciprocal pairwise comparisons is considered, it is always possible to construct an Arrowian social welfare function using a two-stage social choice process. In stage 1, the individual pa...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Istanbul University Journal of the School of Business,
The brain generally miniaturizes its perceptions into what may be regarded as a model of what happens outside. We experience the world according to the capacity of our nervous system to register the stimuli we receive. In order to understand and control the environment there needs to be proportio...

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas
We present an alternative process to address the Israeli Palestinian conflict. It does so in two ways that are different from past efforts. The first is by formally structuring the conflict and the second is the manner in which discussions are conducted and conclusions drawn.

Thomas Saaty, H. J. Zoffer
Journal: International Journal of the Analytic Hierarchy Process
Decision making is a central activity of all people, usually done so automatically that we do not even realize that we are doing it every moment of every day of every year for all our lives. This silent and inarticulate approach worked well when humanity was fragmented and individuals and groups ...

Thomas Saaty, Nina Begicevic
Journal: International Journal of Economics and Business Research
Even in science, there is always the human element of using our own assumptions in logic, our feelings, our values and numerous criteria we must deal with. In addition, we often have to include the measurements of tangibles that always need agreed upon subjective judgement to interpret what exact...

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas
Journal: Social Choice and Welfare
Preferences in Arrow’s conditions are ordinal. Here we show that when intensity of preference represented by reciprocal pairwise comparisons is considered, it is always possible to construct an Arrowian social welfare function using a two-stage social choice process. In stage 1, the individual pa...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: International Journal of the Analytic Hierarchy Process
Comparisons are the bedrock of all human thinking no matter where it is done on this earth in every culture. We compare things with one another and with themselves through memory to know if they are what we are looking for. We need memory and time to do that regardless of how brief and spontaneou...

Thomas Saaty, Jennifer Shang
Journal: European Journal of Operational Research
An innovative Analytic Hierarchy Process-based structure is developed to capture the relationship between various levels of activities contributed by people to society. Physical objects have widespread extension and degrees of importance that often differ by many orders of magnitude. Similarly, m...

Thomas Saaty, H. J. Zoffer
Journal: Information Technology & Decision Making
In most long-lasting conflicts, each party's grievances increase while the concessions they are willing to make decline in number, quality, and perceived value. Both parties lose sight of what they are willing to settle for, generally exaggerate their own needs, and minimize the needs of the ...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: International Journal of the Analytic Hierarchy Process
Decision making depends on identifying a structure of criteria and alternatives of a decision. It also depends on experience and judgments to select the best alternative. In the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for decision making the criteria and alternatives are prioritized by forming matrices ...

Thomas Saaty, Nina Begicevic
Journal: Applied Soft Computing
During and at the end of Olympic games, we are always given the number of gold, silver and bronze medals won by each country and often the total number won as an indicator of the surmised winner. The groups that report the medal count in this manner indicate that they believe all medals are the s...

Thomas Saaty, Liem Tran
Journal: International Journal of Strategic Decision Sciences
Using fuzzy set theory has become attractive to many people. However, the many references cited here and in other works, little thought is given to why numbers should be made fuzzy before plunging into the necessary simulations to crank out numbers without giving reason or proof that it works to ...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Economic Horizons
This paper provides a summary of a mathematical theory about the use of expert judgments in paired comparisons and how to derive priorities from them particularly when intangible factors are involved. An example to validate the process when applied to tangibles is given along with a simple decisi...

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas, Rozann Whitaker
Journal: International Journal of the Analytic Hierarchy Process
The paper provides an overview that covers the main criticisms of the AHP and the authors replies to them. Because there have been many papers that reply to criticisms, the thrust here is to classify them and reply to them briefly in each category without giving lengthy repetitions of what is alr...

Thomas Saaty, Mujgan Sagir Ozdemir
Journal: Mathematical and Computer Modelling
Rank preservation and reversal, so fundamental in decision making, have been an unresolved issue in the field of economics and utility theory and came into focus when the Analytic Hierarchy Process was developed because it uses paired comparisons that inevitably make the priorities of the alterna...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: International Journal of the Analytic Hierarchy Process
The object here is to show that our thinking processes and our physical forms and those of all things that exist, are a result of response in nature to influences as stimuli, brought about by natural occurrences. The ideas are developed through a generalization of the role judgment plays in decis...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: International Journal of the Analytic Hierarchy Process
In decision making the priority scales are derived objectively after subjective judgments are made, and they reflect the importance of the influences we considered. The process is the opposite of what is done in the physical sciences where the subjectivity of interpreting the final number comes a...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: International Journal of the Analytic Hierarchy Process
Let me take this occasion to wish this journal and its contributors my very best. It is a joyful occasion to have our own journal for decision making with the AHP/ANP and my message to you follows.

Thomas Saaty, Mujgan Sagir Ozdemir
Journal: International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making
Tangibles have measurements generally on ratio scales with arbitrary units that are always interpreted by using judgments as to what particular purpose the measurements serve. How two measurements on a ratio scale are related with respect to dominance leads to forming their ratio which is a dimen...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: RACSAM-Revista de la Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, Fisicas y Naturales. Serie A. Matematicas
According to the great mathematician Henri Lebesgue, making direct comparisons of objects with regard to a property is a fundamental mathematical process for deriving measurements. Measuring objects by using a known scale first then comparing the measurements works well for properties for which s...

Thomas Saaty, Mariya Sodenkamp
Journal: International Journal of Applied Decision Sciences
This paper summarises a mathematical theory of the measurement of both tangible and intangible factors, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and its generalisation to dependence and feedback, the Analytic Network Process (ANP) and illustrates their application to making complex multicriteria deci...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Journal of Systems Science and Systems Engineering
It often happens that at the end of Olympics games the medals won by more than one country are many and close in total number as in the 2008 games where China won 100 medals with many gold ones and the United States won 110 medals but with a lesser number of gold medals. The question is: Although...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: European Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics
Mathematics applications largely depend on scientific practice. In science measurement depends on the use of scales, most frequently ratio scales. A ratio scale there is applied to measure various physical attributes and assumes a zero and an arbitrary unit used uniformly throughout an applicatio...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: International journal of services sciences
Decisions involve many intangibles that need to be traded off. To do that, they have to be measured along side tangibles whose measurements must also be evaluated as to, how well, they serve the objectives of the decision maker. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is a theory of measurement thro...

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas
Journal: Mathematical and Computer Modelling
To achieve a decision with which the group is satisfied, the group members must accept the judgments, and ultimately the priorities. This requires that (a) the judgments be homogeneous, and (b) the priorities of the individual group members be compatible with the group priorities. There are three...

Thomas Saaty, Liem Tran
Journal: Mathematical and Computer Modelling
Fuzzy set theory has serious difficulties in producing valid answers in decision-making by fuzzifying judgments. No theorems are available about its workability when it is applied indiscriminately as a number crunching approach to numerical measurements that represent judgments. When judgments ar...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Mathematical and Computer Modelling
Because good decisions depend on the conditions of the future, and because conditions vary over time, to make a good decision requires judgments of what is more likely or more preferred over different time periods. There are at least three ways to deal with dynamic decisions. One is to include in...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Mathematical and Computer Modelling
Individuals, corporations and governments constantly face the extremely complex problem of ordering and prioritizing their numerous decisions according to urgency and importance. They need to sequence expenditures and allocate scarce resources to optimize the returns on their investments over tim...

Thomas Saaty, Kirti Peniwati, Jennifer Shang
Journal: Mathematical and Computer Modelling
The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) provides a way to rank the alternatives of a problem by deriving priorities. A question that occurs in practice is: what is the best combination of alternatives that has the largest sum of priorities and satisfies given constraints? This leads one to consider ...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: International Symposium on QFD, ISQFD

Thomas Saaty, Miguel H. Beltran
Journal: Design Methods and Theories
The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), which is explained and applied in another article in the same journal, is used to illustrate the architectural design of a house for a family of three. The plan of the house was develop to satisfy the family's needs by considering the size of the lot, the siz...

Thomas Saaty, Jennifer Shang
Journal: Socio-Economic Planning Sciences
This paper puts forth a framework for reshaping the group decision-making process. The proposed framework extends from the usual one-issue-at-a-time decision-making to one that involves several related issues simultaneously. Weaknesses of the traditional majority voting mechanism are first identi...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Journal of Systems Science and Systems Engineering
Fuzzy logic has difficulty producing valid answers in decision-making. Absent are theorems to prove that it works to produce results already known that are being estimated with judgments by transforming such judgments numerically. The numerical representation of judgments in the AHP is already fu...

Mujgan Sagir Ozdemir, Thomas Saaty
Journal: European journal of operational research
The unknown or “other” that affects our lives is what we usually very much want to know about to cope with uncertainty. We often suspect that it affects us with partial and indefinite evidence that it exists but we only have uncertain feelings about it. Even when we do not know what it is we woul...

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas
Journal: International Journal of Management and Decision Making
In this short paper it is shown that care is required to perform the appropriate normalisation needed to derive the right set of priorities from paired comparisons when criteria are added or deleted in a decision problem. This is particularly true for criteria with respect to which the alternativ...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: European Journal of Operational Research
Rank preservation and reversal are important subjects in multi-criteria decision-making particularly if a theory uses only one of two ways of creating priorities: rating alternatives one at a time with respect to an ideal or standard, or comparing them in pairs. It is known that our minds can do ...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Journal of Systems Science and Systems Engineering
Several examples that serve to validate the AHP/ANP with matrices hierarchies and networks are given in this paper. They are then followed by a discussion of the real numbers and how they are generated without the need for an absolute zero, and how they define an absolute scale of measurement tha...

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas
Journal: International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making
This paper gives a brief overview of the well-known impossibility-possibility theorem in constructing a social welfare function from individual functions. The Analytic Hierarchy Process uses a fundamental scale of absolute numbers to represent judgments about dominance in paired comparisons. It i...

Michael Niemira, Thomas Saaty
Journal: International Journal of Forecasting
We discuss and develop an imbalance-crisis turning point model to forecast the likelihood of a financial crisis based on an Analytic Network Process framework. The Analytic Network Process (ANP) is a general theory of relative measurement used to derive composite-priority-ratio scales from indivi...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Journal of systems science and systems engineering
The general theory of the ANP enables one to deal with the benefits, opportunities, costs, and risks (the BOCR merits) of a decision, by introducing the notion of negative priorities for C and R along with the rating (not comparison) of the top priority alternative synthesized for each of the fou...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Journal of Systems science and Systems engineering
The Analytic Network Process (ANP) is a multicriteria theory of measurement used to derive relative priority scales of absolute numbers from individual judgments (or from actual measurements normalized to a relative form) that also belong to a fundamental scale of absolute numbers. These judgment...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Journal of systems science and systems engineering
This is the first part of an introduction to multicriteria decision making using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and its generalization, the Analytic Network Process (ANP). The discussion involves individual and group decisions both with the independence of the criteria from the alternatives...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Journal of Systems Science and Systems Engineering
In contrast with conscious decision-making, there are numerous subconscious decisions that we make without thinking about them. Some are biological and are made by different parts of our body to keep it alive and functioning normally. Others are a result of repetition and training that we can the...

Thomas Saaty, Mujgan Sagir Ozdemir
Journal: Mathematical and computer modelling
In 1956, Miller conjectured that there is an upper limit on our capacity to process information on simultaneously interacting elements with reliable accuracy and with validity. This limit is seven plus or minus two elements. He noted that the number 7 occurs in many aspects of life, from the seve...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: European journal of operational research
In this paper it is shown that the principal eigenvector is a necessary representation of the priorities derived from a positive reciprocal pairwise comparison judgment matrix A=(aij) when A is a small perturbation of a consistent matrix. When providing numerical judgments, an individual attempts...

Mujgan Sagir Ozdemir, Thomas Saaty
Ranking is a process of prioritization. Priorities, as measurement rather than pure guessing, can be derived from paired comparison judgments that generalize on ratios of actual measurements. Paired comparisons involve the selection of the smaller of the two objects being compared as the unit and...

Thomas Saaty, Mujgan Sagir Ozdemir
In decision-making, there are often criteria that are opposite in direction to other criteria as in benefits (B) versus costs (C), and in opportunities (O) versus risks (R), and sometimes need to be distinguished by using negative numbers. In making paired comparisons of alternatives with respect...

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas, Klaus Dellmann
Journal: Socio-Economic Planning Sciences
An intangible is an attribute that has no scale of measurement. Intangibles such as effort and skill arise in conjunction with resource allocation but are not usually included directly in a mathematical model because of the absence of a unit of measurement. However, intangibles can be quantified ...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Scientia Iranica
In this paper, an introduction is given to decision-making theory, the Analytic Hierarchy Process. In the AHP, a decision hierarchy is constructed with a goal, criteria and alternatives. The criteria are pairwise compared for their importance with respect to the goal to derive a scale of relative...

Andrew Blair, Gershon Mandelker, Thomas Saaty, Rozann Whitaker
Journal: Socio-Economic Planning Sciences
This paper describes a forecast of the date for the resumption of growth of the US economy in 2001. It uses an expert judgment approach within the framework of decision theory, the Analytic Hierarchy Process, as well as its generalization to dependence and feedback, the Analytic Network Process.

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Artificial Neural Nets and Genetic Algorithms
The brain generally miniaturizes its perceptions into what may be regarded as a model of what happens outside. We experience the world according to the capacity of our nervous system to register the stimuli we receive. In order to understand and control the environment there needs to be proportio...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Artificial Neural Nets and Genetic Algorithms
Decision-making, a natural and fundamental process of the brain, involves the use of pairwise comparisons. They are represented by a matrix whose entries belong to a fundamental scale, and from which an eigenvector of priorities that belongs to a ratio scale is derived. A simple decision is repre...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Proceedings of the Sixth International Symposium on the Analytic Hierarchy Process
We demonstrate how the integers 1 to 9 used in the Fundamental Scale of the AHP to represent pairwise comparison judgments can be derived from stimulus-response theory. The conditions required for the stability of the eigenvector of priorities, known from the mathematics literature, are briefly m...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Software The National Missile Defence (NMD) Example
There are three phases in the creation of the structure of a complex decision, 1) the subjective personal, group or corporate values, 2) the interface- merits of the decision between the first (the subjective), and the third (the objective) phases: Benefits, opportunities, costs and risks and the...

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas
Journal: Models, Methods, Concepts & Applications of the Analytic Hierarchy Process
In this paper, we used a decision making tool, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), to analyze a decision to select a trade status for China that is in the best interest of the United States before that decision came before Congress for a vote.

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Multiple Criteria Decision Making in the New Millennium
The seven pillars of the AHP, some highlights of which are discussed in the paper, are: 1) ratio scales derived from reciprocal paired comparisons; 2) paired comparisons and the psychophysical origin of the fundamental scale used to make the comparisons; 3) conditions for sensitivity of the eigen...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Revista de la Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas Fisicas y Naturales
An assumption arising from the practice of science and engineering since the middle ages is that because nature is physical, we should be able to relate all measurement to physical dimensions. But that is not true. Human thinking and feeling exist in the physical world but they are not matter or ...

Ido Millet, Thomas Saaty
The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) has been criticized for allowing the introduction of new alternatives to cause rank reversals among existing alternatives. While in many cases this is a perfectly valid phenomenon there are also many cases where rank should be preserved. To address both contin...

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas
Journal: Operations Research
Judgments are needed in medical diagnosis to determine what tests to perform given certain symptoms. For many diseases, what information to gather on symptoms and what combination of symptoms lead to a given disease are not well known. Even when the number of symptoms is small, the required numbe...

Thomas Saaty, G Hu
Journal: Applied Mathematics Letters
Counter-examples are given to show that in decision making, different methods of deriving priority vectors may be close for every single pairwise comparison matrix, yet they can lead to different overall rankings. When the judgments are inconsistent, their transitivity affects the final outcome...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Operations Research
This paper is an outgrowth of a talk given at a plenary session of the national meeting of ORSA/TIMS (now INFORMS) in May of 1996. Rather than speculate on what might be the possible domain of OR/MS within a systems framework, the paper gives a sketch of what basic ideas there are today that can ...

Thomas Saaty, Enrique Mu
Journal: Socio-Economic Planning Sciences
How should the Peruvian Government resolve the Japanese embassy takeover hostage crisis? As of this writing, MRTA operatives continue to hold 72 hostages and demand the release of their jailed comrades among other concessions. We have used the Analytic Hierarchy Process decision methodology to an...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Journal of Multi‐Criteria Decision Analysis
There are two basic principles that are totally missed by Salo and Hamalaninen in their attempt to reformulate the AHP, which is based on ratio scales, to fit multiattribute value theory, which is based on interval scales.

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas
Journal: Mathematical and Computer modelling
Following earlier work on neural firing and synthesis, we use the expressions we derived elsewhere in the literature for that purpose, to show how we can represent images and sounds with the aid of CLOS (Common Lisp Object System) computer program of the LISP computer language.

Thomas Saaty, Kirti Peniwati
Journal: Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (ISAHP’96)
The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) provides a way to rank the alternatives of a problem by deriving priorities. A question that occurs in practice is: what is the best combination of alternatives that has the largest sum of priorities and satisfies given constraints? This leads one to consider ...

Thomas Saaty, D.S. Turner
Journal: Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (ISAHP’96)
This paper develops a refined benefiticost model using the supermatrix approach of the AHP to predict the outcome of the playoffs and the Super Bowl of the 1995-1996 season. Introduction In October 1995, we undertook the task of predicting (Sooty and Vargas, 1991)' the outcome of the 1996 Sup...

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas
Journal: Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (ISAHP’96)
We examine some examples where the use of cardinal preferences solves problems that occur when ordinal preferences are used exclusively. Ordinal preferences are the first step toward ranking alternatives but they are not the last. In general we are interested in deriving a consistent ranking of a...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (ISAHP’96)
Multicriteria decision making depends On the use of numbers and scales to make trade-offs. We examine in detail the types of numerical scales of measurement there are and which ones seem to work better for measurement in a hierarchic model of a complex problem. It is argued that ratio scales play...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (ISAHP’96)
For very large model applications, AHP is known to suffer from a number of shortcomings related to time, effort and consistency at performing multiple painvise comparisons. A number of methods have been proposed to shorten the time and relate the effort to the decision precision required, or inde...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Journal of Accounting Literature
Apostolou and Hassell in their overview of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and its applications to accounting included a section on some theoretical questions about the AHP that differ considerably from my own understanding as the creator of that theory. There are now more than 1,200 papers ...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Journal of advanced transportation
Five examples of applications of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) are made to illustrate the different uses of this ratio scale multicriteria decision method in transportation. They include a commuter route selection hierarchy, a best mix of routes to Pittsburgh's new International Airport, a...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Applied Mathematics Letters
We develop a metric for ratio scales and explore the notion of compatibility of two sets of measurements of a set of objects or properties on a ratio scale. We briefly address Arrow's impossibility theorem. We maintain that it is not as impossible as claimed when, as in reality, a certain degree ...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Interfaces
People make three general types of judgments to express importance, preference, or likelihood and use them to choose the best among alternatives in the presence of environmental, social, political, and other influences. They base these judgments on knowledge in memory or from analyzing benefits, ...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Proceedings of the 3rd International Symposium on the Analytic Hierarchy Process
From the early years of development of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) I examined a number of alternatives for hierarchic composition that produced ratio scales. Ratio scales were always in my thinking because of my strong interest in physics. There one multiplies different ratio scales befo...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: European Journal of operational research
This paper provides a detailed discussion with references on the fundamentals of the Analytic Hierarchy Process and in particular of relative measurement. The points discussed are grouped under the following categories: Structure in the AHP — Hierarchies and Networks, Scales of Measurement, Judgm...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Journal of the Operational Research Society
Response to Holder's comments on the analytic hierarchy process

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas
Journal: Mathematical and computer modelling
In this note, we give examples of the use of linear combinations of impulse response functions to represent visual images. We also derive expressions for estimating the parameters of these functions using the Fourier transform of stimuli.

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas
Journal: Journal of Mathematical Psychology
Neurons are decision makers that decide from instant to instant whether to fire or not to fire based on information received through neurotransmitter electric charge. In firing they accomplish two goals. First, they pass information to other neurons which in their turn make a decision to fire or ...

James Benne, Thomas Saaty
Journal: Mathematical and computer modelling
Benefit-cost analysis has traditionally required monetary measures of benefits and costs of candidate projects. This paper demonstrates that priorities of both tangible and intangible attributes can be used in a benefit-cost setting to address the long standing problem of allocating multiple reso...

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas
Journal: Mathematical and computer modelling
We show through simulation that three methods of scaling, distributive (uniqueness is important), ideal (uniqueness is not important), and utility (use of interval scales for the ideal) modes, yield the same ranking of alternatives with surprisingly high frequency, except for the case of copies o...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Mathematical and Computer Modelling
Traditionally, measurement scales with a unit are assumed to be available to measure and rank alternatives. However, such scales are scarce and it is often desired to rank alternatives on many tangible and intangible criteria. How? Relative measurement is a method for deriving ratio scales from p...

Indrani Basak, Thomas Saaty
Journal: Mathematical and computer modelling
Various methods of consensus of preference rankings of individuals are described in applying group decision making. Here, we discuss two different approaches, one deterministic and the other stochastic. The first is applicable to situations where the group is small, and the second applies to opin...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Journal of scientific & industrial research
A brief introduction to making decisions by the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is given. A simple illustration of how to decide on which of three people should get a heart transplant is provided. How to structure a decision problem and how to enter judgments semantically, transform them to pair...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Journal of the Operational Research Society
It would have been fitting and proper were Holder, in his call for more validation of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), to have validated his own vague suggestions for a better optics experiment with chairs; a power scale to fulfil his desire for non-linearity, and its credibility in applicat...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium of The Analytic Hierarchy Process
A variety of authors have given real life examples that violate the utility theory axiom of independence from irrelevant alternatives. A theory that can only rank alternatives ione at a time such as Multiattribute Utility Theory has difficulty showing how introducing new alternatives that do not ...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium of The Analytic Hierarchy Process
How does one structure a decision problem with dependencies derive priorities and make choices among interdependent alternatives?

Thomas Saaty, James France, Kathleen Riehle Valentine
Journal: Socio-economic planning sciences
Each year graduate business admissions committees must carefully evaluate prospective students. Committees must judge the performance of applicants with respect to a wide range of quantitative and qualitative criteria in order to select the best students. The overall process is complex and time c...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Behaviormetrika
In this paper we give a skeletal outline of the foundations of the Analytic Hierarchy Process and some of its highlights. We also show that the principal eigenvector solution is essential for deriving the scale of priorities from the fundamental scale of judgments given in the matrix.

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Behaviormetrika
We derive ratio scales from paired comparison judgments in a reciprocal matrix A. When the judgments are consistent, we have a principal eigenvalue structure which is preserved when A is perturbed. Mathematical conditions are given on the size of the perturbations to produce a good approximation ...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: European journal of operational research
The eigenvector method deals with two questions simultaneously, closeness and order. Together, they belong to the field topology of order. The metric idea of closeness is inadequate to judge what is a good approximation to data involving order relations. There is usually a condition which relates...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: European Journal of Operational Research
We show that there is a close mathematical relationship between physics and the Analytic Hierarchy Process. We argue that numerical scales used in physics must be interpreted in terms which the scientist understands through experience and through theories advocated by experts in the field. In phy...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: European journal of operational research
This paper serves as an introduction to the Analytic Hierarchy Process — A multicriteria decision making approach in which factors are arranged in a hierarchic structure. The principles and the philosophy of the theory are summarized giving general background information of the type of measuremen...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Management science
An exposition of the AHP in reply to the paper " remarks on the analytic hierarchy process"

Thomas Saaty
Journal: International Journal of Conflict Management
The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is a theory of measurement. When applied in decision‐making, it assists one to describe the general decision operation by decomposing a complex problem into a multi‐level hierarchic structure of objectives, criteria, subcriteria and alternatives. The AHP provi...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: The analytic hierarchy process
This paper focuses on the application of the Analytic Hierarchy Process in a group setting. In particular, we present observations and suggestions that are intended to help in the planning and execution of a group decision-making effort in which AΗΡ plays a major role.

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Defense Analysis
Everyone agrees that international conflicts carry the seed of worldwide destruction, thus requiring an effective approach to their resolution. The major problem of international conflict resolution today, however, is how to avoid war rather than how to attain peace. Still, the continuance of a g...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Decision Sciences
The purpose of this note is to comment on the artificiality of using known scales of measurement (or conveniently improvised numbers) to make decisions. In particular, the pitfalls of trying to please the decision maker and of using normalization as a number crunching tool are discussed. Finally,...

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas
Journal: Applied Mathematics Letters
We extend our earlier work on positive reciprocal kernels of Fredholm integral operators [9] to study firings and their synthesis in neural networks. First, we show that, in general, neural response in both spontaneous and non-spontaneous firing give rise to generalized functions of the Dirac t...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Preprints of International Symposium on the Analytic Hierarchy Process, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China
This note deals with the idea that there are many ways of deriving composite priorities in the AHP that do not all lead to the same outcome. ' The current approach of distributing the weight of an element in a hierarchy in proportion to the priorities of the elements compared with respect to ...

Thomas Saaty, William Wedley
Journal: Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences/Revue Canadienne des Sciences de l'Administration
The free trade negotiations between Canada and the United States are a type of conflict where each side considers not only its own gains and losses but also Us perceptions of the gains and losses of the other side. The assessment involves intangibles and tradeoffs which can be structured and anal...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Mathematical models for decision support
Decisions involving several criteria and alternatives need a correct procedure to combine weights to make tradeoffs and select the best alternatives. There are two parts to the problem, both of which need proof. The first is how to generate judgments and associate numbers with them, and the secon...

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas
Journal: The Logic of Priorities
The domestic strife in South Africa between ruling whites and subordinated blacks threatens to become a major conflict of violent dimensions in the African continent. This strife is primarily a consequence of racial policies promulgated by the white apartheid regime. Donald Woods (1978) describes...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: IFAC Proceedings Volumes
In prolonged confrontations, known here as retributive, the parties not only exact their own demands but also want to incur a high cost on the opponent. Success in resolving a conflict is measured by the gain: each party's benefits and the costs to the opponent compared with the perceived gain fo...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Applied Mathematics Letters
Modern mathematics continues to lag the real world by not offering new theories and concepts. Despite great excitement within the field about all sorts of progress in the subject, the availability and application of mathematics to new political and social structures is primitive and its relevance...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Expert judgment and expert systems
Cognitive psychologists have classified thinking into two types. This division has gone by many names. Aristotle referred to it as active versus passive reason [35]; Freud [10] as secondary versus primary process thinking; and Hobbes [14] as thought with or without “designe.” More recently the di...

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas
Journal: European Journal of Operational Research
The Analytic Hierarchy Process uses paired comparisons to derive a scale of relative importance for alternatives. We investigate the effect of uncertainty in judgment on the stability of the rank order of alternatives. The uncertainty experienced by decision makers in making comparisons is measur...

Andrew Blair, Robert Nachtmann, Josephine Olson, Thomas Saaty
Studies have indicated that forecasts by market experts can be more accurate than time series forecasts. This article describes a process for structuring an expert foreign exchange forecast using Saaty's Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The specific example developed is a forecast of the yen/dol...

Ami Arbel, Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas
Journal: IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics
An approach to understanding and assessing issues concerning arms control is presented. Arms control has two main objectives: (1) decreasing the possibility of a nuclear exchange; and (2) limiting the scope and intensity of such an exchange. A framework is presented for dealing with those issues ...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Mathematics Magazine
Rank According to Perron: A New Insight

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Decision sciences
Decision making has the objective of finding the best alternative or set of alternatives by considering a number of goals, objectives, criteria, competitors, and other important factors. The analytic hierarchy process is a decision aid used to assist a decision maker in sorting out the complexity...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Risk Analysis
Risk estimation involves priorities and probabilities which are themselves a form of priority of natural alternatives. This paper provides illustrations of how one can deal with risk and uncertainty using the Analytic Hierarchy Process, a new approach to measurement by ratio scales. The paper als...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Mathematical Modelling
Hierarchic and network systems are discussed as basic frameworks of unstructured problems modeled by the Analytic Hierarchy Process. A hierarchy represents a linear chain of interactions, whereas a network allows for feedback in the form of cycles and loops. A theory is provided for the prioritie...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Mathematical Modelling
The Analytic Hierarchy Process is used to show how forecasts can be made of the effects of monetarist, Keynesian and supply-side macroeconomic policies and to determine their impact on important variables such as unemployment, inflation and GNP growth.

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas
Journal: Journal of Mathematical Psychology
The paper presents a theory for constructing response scales based on the reciprocal property of paired comparisons of stimuli from the same sensory continuum. Reciprocal paired comparisons define the pair estimator function K(s, t), the kernel of a Fredholm integral equation of the second kind. ...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Socio-Economic Planning Sciences
It is shown here that one cannot simply take columns of numbers, normalize them and add to obtain results corresponding to operations in the AHP. This is what traditional expected value theory using a single scale would lead one to do. Care needs to be exercised. What one must do is to interpret ...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Socio-Economic Planning Sciences
This paper explores the concept of optimization by solely using the AHP and compares outcomes with those obtained in traditional optimization theory without and with constraints. The difference is essentially in the absence of the traditional black box involving complex manipulations in algebra o...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Socio-Economic Planning Sciences
In this paper it is shown that there are two types of measurement involved in the AHP, absolute and relative. The first requires a standard with which to compare elements, but mostly alternatives at the bottom of the hierarchy. The process leads to absolute preservation in the rank of the alterna...

Thomas Saaty, Masahiro Takizawa
Journal: European journal of operational research
Most decisions need to be free from assumptions of independence to be faithful to the complex problems in which they arise. This paper illustrates how to generate priorities for decisions involving general types of dependence of criteria on alternatives, criteria on criteria and alternatives on a...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Management science
This paper contains an axiomatic treatment of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The set of axioms corresponding to hierarchic structures are a special case of axioms for priority setting in systems with feedback which allow for a wide class of dependencies. The axioms highlight: (1) the recip...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Mathematical Modelling
The rank of a set of alternatives can change if a new criterion is introduced into the set of criteria, but it can also change if the importances of the criteria depend on the number of alternatives and on the strength of their ranking. As a result a new alternative may change the relative order ...

David Tarbell, Thomas Saaty
Journal: Journal of Peace Science
The domestic strife in South Africa between ruling whites and subordinated blacks threatens to become a major conflict of violent dimensions in the African continent. This strife is primarily a consequence of racial policies promulgated by the white, apartheid regime. Donald Woods (1978) describe...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: European Journal of Operational Research
To scale the membership function, a method is needed that can assess the importance of elements with respect to a property or criterion that is common among them. It is conceivable that membership should be determined in terms of several criteria tangible and intangible. The approach needed is a...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Trabajos de Estadistica Y de Investigacion Operativa
We prove that the principal eigenvector of a positive matrix represents the relative dominance of its rows of ranking of alternatives in a decision represented by the rows of a pairwise comparison matrix.

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Quantitative Assessment in Arms Control
The traditional view of conflict is that it is a struggle between people who are in the right and people who are in the wrong. If one wished to be more religious about it, our imprinting from childhood seems to say that conflict is a struggle between good and evil. A more realistic view of confli...

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas
Journal: Journal of Mathematical Psychology
Conditions for rank preservation in a positive reciprocal matrix that is inconsistent are provided. Three methods of deriving ratio estimates are examined: the eigenvalue, the logarithmic least squares, and the least squares methods. It is shown that only the principal eigenvector directly deals ...

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas
Journal: Omega
WE ARE GLAD to be finally'answering Belton and Gear's concerns expressed in their article in Omega [l]. There are two points they make in their letter. The first has to do with rank reversal, and the second with how to ask the question by minimizing fuzziness. Our response is organized into four ...

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas
Journal: Mathematical modelling
Three methods—the eigenvalue, logarithmic least squares, and least squares methods—used to derive estimates of ratio scales from a positive reciprocal matrix are analyzed. The criteria for comparison are the measurement of consistency, dual solutions, and rank preservation. It is shown that the e...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Discrete and System Models
We are interested in the problem of finding a scale which reflects the relative intensity of a property shared by n objects. The objects may be n stones and the properties may be their weights. What is needed is a theory that would enable us to conduct measurement which produces not only known re...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Mathematical Modelling in Science and Technology
The process of setting priorities in systems with a network structure is more complex than it is in a hierarchy which is essentially linear. The composition of priorities in a hierarchy is a special case of composition in a system. Simple examples of composition in hierarchies with cycles between...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Interfaces
The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is compared with game and metagame theories for analyzing conflicts. The AHP helps to structure the problem, generate and synthesize judgments, and carry out a benefit/cost analysis of various policies. The Falkland Islands crisis is examined using the judgmen...

Thomas Saaty, Molly Wong
Journal: Journal of Mathematical Sociology
In this study, cultural, economic as well as certain crucial demographic factors are considered as the determinants for projecting the average family size in rural India. We use the Analytic Hierarchy Process to analyze influences of the factors which enter implicitly in a rural couple's deci...

J. Aczel, Thomas Saaty
Journal: Journal of mathematical Psychology
Requirements which seem reasonable for functions synthesizing judgements (quantities or their ratios), in particular separability, associativity or bisymmetry, cancellativity, consensus, reciprocal or homogeneity properties are investigated and all functions satisfying them are determined.

Thomas Saaty
Journal: IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management
There are three principles which one can recognize in problem solving. They are the principles of decomposition, comparative judgments, and synthesis of priorities. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) provides a comprehensive framework to cope with the intuitive, the rational, and the irrational...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Research in Higher Education
This paper proposes a novel evaluation approach for the selection of candidates for promotion and/or tenure. The decision problem is conceptualized as a hierarchy of factors and a mathematical procedure known as the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used for successively “weighting” or prioriti...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Architectural Science Review
A degree of fuzziness accompanies complex architectural problems. The concept of fuzziness can be compared to the hierarchy of the nervous system. Three types of fuzziness can be isolated: instantaneous, ongoing and long term. In this paper, the need for the development of a conceptually simple f...

Thomas Saaty, H Gholamnezhad
Journal: Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design
A new approach is introduced for evaluating strategies for the safe disposal of high-level nuclear waste. Five strategies are considered, and by means of the effective method of ‘analytic hierarchy process’ these strategies are prioritized with respect to a set of tangible and intangible criteria...

James Emshoff, Thomas Saaty
Journal: European Journal of Operational Research
This paper considers the long range planning process from the point of view both of projecting forward likely or desired changes from the current position to define a possible future state, and of identifying desirable future states and working backwards from those to consider ways in which they ...

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas, Amos Barzilay
We use the analytic hierarchy process to analyze the role of subjective factors in decision making as illustrated in the Iran rescue operation. Essentially, we show that a decision maker and that decision maker's advisors may differ in their estimates on whether an action should or should not...

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas
Journal: The Logic of Priorities
The domestic strife in South Africa between ruling whites and subordinated blacks threatens to become a major conflict of violent dimensions in the African continent. This strife is primarily a consequence of racial policies promulgated by the white apartheid regime. Donald Woods (1978) describes...

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas
Journal: The Logic of Priorities
Today oil is the world’s major energy resource. It accounts for about 54 percent of the world’s total energy consumption. Because of conservation and the development of alternative resources in industrialized countries, the share of oil in the world’s total energy consumption is expected to decli...

Vasudevan Ramanujam, Thomas Saaty
Journal: Technological Forecasting and Social Change
A novel and practical approach is proposed for the assessment and selection of imported technology by the less developed countries. Technological choice is conceptualized as a multiobjective, multicriterion problem wherein subjective judgments and political processes play key roles. A new plannin...

Luis Vargas, Thomas Saaty
Journal: Industrial Marketing Management
We show that there is no single best solution in the leasing versus company ownership problem for the fleet administration industry as a whole. Because of the different styles and traditions of firms and because of the emphasis on intangibles beyond economics, a unifying framework of reference in...

Yoram Wind, Thomas Saaty
Journal: Management science
Several marketing applications of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) are reviewed. The paper starts with a brief description of this process, which was developed by Thomas Saaty in 1971, including an eight-point outline of how to apply it. The thrust of the paper is a discussion of a number of ...

Thomas Saaty, Paul C. Rogers, Ricardo Pell
Journal: The journal of portfolio management
The method we will discuss addresses the huge task of ranking and choosing from among a large set of stocks in order to devide how much of our recources should be allocated to each of the stocks chosen.

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas
Journal: Behavioral science
In this paper we use the analytic hierarchy process to combine technical and behavioral characteristics of chess players and predict the outcome of a championship match. The method also applies to decision making in living systems at the level of the group. Our approach to prediction deals with t...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: International Journal of Game Theory
In this paper we study the U.S.-OPEC oil conflict and compute the payoff matrix for each of the two players using the Analytic Hierarchy Process by first evaluating the strategies of each player according to their intrinsic merits and then according to their relative strengths when considered aga...

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas
Journal: The Logic of Priorities
A short time ago it was unthinkable and deemed an academic exercise to speak of rationing. People thought that there could be no crippling energy crisis because our energy czars and planners would presumably take our needs into their projections. Today the situation looks very different. Witness ...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Mathematics and computers in Simulation
The question often arises in regard to the use of Analytic Hierarchy Process: What would one do if the judgments where to change? A simple answer to that problem is that one should solve the new problem. But this is not what people usually have in mind. Presumably what they would like is a parame...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Mathematics and Computers in Simulation
In a previous article which appeared in this journal I outlined some of the ideas involved in measuring priorities in hierarchical systems. It was my hope to show that when dealing with complexity, a hierarchical structure with ratio scale measurement provides a natural expression of the mind to...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Journal of mathematical psychology
The purpose of this paper is to investigate a method of scaling ratios using the principal eigenvector of a positive pairwise comparison matrix. Consistency of the matrix data is defined and measured by an expression involving the average of the nonprincipal eigenvalues. We show that λmax = n is ...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Systems Methodology in Social Science Research
What is being frequently tested in society today is not our engineering skill or our ability to bring technology to bear on life’s problems, but our sense of priorities and our capacity to make trade-offs between various factors that have an impact on life. The trade-offs cannot all be measured i...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Interfaces
The Sudan, population 18.2 million, in area the largest country in Africa is traversed by the White and Blue Niles meeting at Khartoum and blessed with rain. It has the potential to be a breedbasket for Africa and the Middle East. Of an estimated 200 million agricultural acres, only 17 million ar...

Joyce M. Alexander, Thomas Saaty
Journal: Behavioral Science
In this study, the forward process of planning is applied to conflict resolution, by structuring a conflict according to the levels of a conceptual hierarchy. The parties to the conflict form the first level, their objectives are at the second level, and possible solutions are at the third and fi...

James P. Bennett, Thomas Saaty
Journal: Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
AS PART OF A STUDY FOR THE ARMS CONTROL AND DISARMAMENT AGENCY THE USE OF ANALYTIC HIERARCHIES AND HOLARCHIES WERE FOUND TO BE A USEFUL GUIDE FOR NEGOTIATORS CONFRONTING TERRORISTS HOLDING HOSTAGES. WHEN THIS FINDING WAS APPLIED TO THE MUNICH MASSACRE OF 1972, THE OBJECTIVES AND INFLUENCES OF THE...

Joyce M. Alexander, Thomas Saaty
Journal: Behavioral Science
In this study, the forward and backward processes of planning are applied to conflict resolution in a way similar to that in which the forward process was applied in a previous paper by the authors . By repeated analysis of the policies of the parties to the conflict and possible reactions to the...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Transportation Research
This paper describes two related aspects of a transportation planning study recently completed for the Sudan—the use of scenarios and the prioritization of those scenarios and the associated transport projects. In the use of scenarios, considerable care was taken in the specification of different...

Thomas Saaty, Fred Ma, Peter Blair
Journal: Energy Policy
A new approach to energy policy analysis is developed by structuring the interactive dynamic processes in energy environment systems Current energy system modelling efforts do not effectively account for multiple interests and the interaction of policy markers. This paper presents a methodology f...

Thomas Saaty, J. P. Bennett
Journal: Behavioral Science
A theory of hierarchies is applied to structure complex decision problems about groups, organizations, societies or supranational systems in three steps. The problem is decomposed into a number of strata, each with several elements which may be people, variables, policies, and so on. We next anal...

Ke-Yuan Chen, Thomas Saaty
Journal: Mathematics Magazine
J. Edgar Hoover, the former FBI Chief, is reported to have had a great aversion to left turns arising from th time his chauffeured car was hit while attempting a lft-hand turn. Thereafter, particularly when the old lawman visited a new city, the driver had to work out the route in advance to avoi...

Thomas Saaty, Paul C. Rogers
Journal: Socio-Economic Planning Sciences
The object of this paper is to illustrate an application of hierarchies and eigenvalues developed by the first author to the area of planning in higher education. We start with a brief discussion of the role of scenario construction in planning and follow it with a discussion of the role of hiera...

Thomas Saaty, Mohamad W. Khouja
Journal: Journal of Peace Science
It is not unusual to think of and write about power without adequate definition. Power is such a rich concept that even for special use it would carry more meaning than maybe intended. Power is closely identified with the ability to do something. Influence is the capacity to sway others to obtain...

Thomas Saaty, Joyce M. Alexander
Journal: SIAM Review
There are a number of useful applications gradually arising out of the geometry of numbers. In this paper we give a brief survey of the fields of packing and covering, stating some results, and giving illustrations of methods of proof and approaches to the subject. We then mention and discuss a v...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Journal of Cybernetics
Set theory begins to be useful when there is some natural criterion for defining belonging to a set. Sets of objects without properties are uninteresting. Elements are assigned to sets because they share properties or conform to a rule. A set of elements is said to be fuzzy when we allow some ele...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Science
The discussion of fuzzy sets indicates that set theory should be extended to make it more suitable for the development of algebraic structures with wider applications. Stochastic optimization, a synthesis of the three areas of continuum mathematics, is a rapidly growing field particularly in the ...

Thomas Saaty
There is a set of n factories, which are located throughout the United States. The wares produced by these factories are delivered to local airports, where they are flown to one of two overseas airports, called distribution centers. The centers distribute the wares to a number of neighboring area...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: The American Mathematical Monthly
After careful analysis of information regarding the origins of the four-color conjecture, Kenneth O. May concludes that: It was not the culmination of a series of individual efforts that flashes across the mind of Francis Guthrie while coloring a map of England... his brother communicated the co...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Interfaces
The crucial thrust of this report develops some ideas about how operations research and management science may increase their effective participation in high level governmental decision making. The opportunity confronting operations research to participate actively in charting the future of our s...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Zarankiewicz has developed results concerning the minimum number of edge intersections, when drawn in a plane, of the bipartite graph consisting of two sets of vertices with one edge joining each element of one set to each element of the other set. When each set has three vertices, we have one of...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: The Mathematics Teacher
In recent years there has been a remarkable surge of effort to develop quantitative foundations for the solution of political problems, both to increase understanding of the underlying structure and to improve predictions.

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Naval Research Logistics Quarterly
The purpose of this paper is to give some elementary theorems on optimization in integers of nonlinear expressions subject to simple equality constraints. Other than the complicated algorithms of integer linear-programming, there is a dirth of examples and a tradition to follow which might help ...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Journal of Combinatorial Theory
After summarizing results of work on a conjecture regarding the minimum number of intersections of a complete graph drawn in the plane, the paper gives two theorems: one regarding a realization scheme for the conjectured quantity, and the other regarding a proof that essentially, the result would...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Mathematics Magazine
The original error discovered by Heawood in Kempe's attempt to prove the four-color conjecture is often encountered by many of those who follow the inductive argument approach to the problem. Perhaps the nature of the difficulty is not well appreciated. An old Chinese proverb urges that to know t...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
Suppose we have number of sensors identified by indexes 1 to N each related to a source that is either active or inactive. The set of sensors is sampled in parallel at regular intervals of wine and a record is made of the output of only one of the sensors, randomly chosen from the set if more tha...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Naval research logistics quarterly
Everyone today knows that a queue is a waiting line. If one also takes the trouble to examine the literature, which now is nearing 2000 references on the subject, he might get the idea that all those contributing to the understanding of congestion phenomena are interested in doing something about...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: SIAM Review
In this note we formulate the problem of allocating communication needs of different cities via relay-type satellites. Our model turns out to be a dynamic (over successive time periods) quadratic nonlinear program requiring integer solutions. Such solutions have been recently studied by Kunzi a...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Operations Research
As the problems and ideas of arms control and disarmament have gained substantial momentum in recent years, the need has developed to look into the refinements of disarmament questions within the framework of national security. Here we have sought to initiate the development of a framework within...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Operations Research
In solving linear programming problems accurate estimates of the number of iterations needed to reach the optimum are important to have. It has been mentioned in the literature that computing experience indicates this number of iterations to be of the order of twice the number of constraints. We ...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B
Models for growth distributions of biological organisms are investigated in this paper. They are specializations of the birth–death equations with two absorbing barriers. The solutions we seek are the distributions of the time to grow from an initial dose to an infective dose. Equations for these...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Operations Research
In this paper we obtain the Laplace transform of the transient probabilities of the ordered queuing problem, with Poisson inputs, multiple channels, and exponential service times. Explicit expressions are derived for the two-channel case and known equilibrium conditions are shown to hold. The pro...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Operations Research
A schedule of allocating labor (in a shipping operation) whose available amount is a function of time, to different tasks, in order to minimize the total cost, is given. The problem is cast in linear-programming form in which all the coefficients are parameterized. An illustration is given follow...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Operations Research
Information from The Royal Board of Swedish Tele-Communications, edited by E. MALMGREN, contains five papers by Conny Palm prefaced by a short article, "Research on Telephone Traffic Carried by Full Availability Groups." It would be desirable to say more regarding these useful papers, but...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Operations Research
This paper is intended as a convenient summary of some results in queuing, which in the author's opinion would be of value to investigators applying the theory to operational problems. The paper is neither intended as an elementary introduction, nor is it an exposition of the techniques used ...

Saul Guss, Thomas Saaty
Journal: Naval research logistics quarterly
If a linear programming problem involves two objective functions, it is desirable to learn all solutions depending on the relative weight attached to the two functions. This paper presents details of an algorithm which finds these solutions systematically.

Thomas Saaty
Journal: The American Mathematical Monthly
The number of vertices of a polyhedron

Saul Guss, Thomas Saaty
Journal: Journal of the Operations Research Society of America
In Part 1 (Saaty, T. L., S. I. Gass. 1954. Parametric objective function (Part 1). J. Opns. Res. Soc. Am.2 316.), the cost function in the general linear programming problem was parametrized with one parameter and the problem of generating solutions completely studied. In Part 2, a generalization...

Saul Guss, Thomas Saaty
Journal: Journal of the Operations Research Society of America
In the linear programming problem where there is a linear function to be optimized (called the objective function), it is desirable to study the behaviour of solutions when the (cost) coefficients in the objective function are parametrized. The problem is then to find the set of xj (j = 1, 2, …, ...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Toward Interactive and Intelligent Decision Support Systems
A hierarchy is a simple structure used to represent the simplest type of functional (contextual or semantic) dependence of one level or component of a system on another in a sequential manner. It is also a convenient way to decompose a complex problem in search of causeeffect explanations in step...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
There are many organizations in the world today that are devoted to studying arms control and conflict resolution. None is really able to provide direct assistance to conflicting parties. what is needed is an international center for Conflict Resolution, located in a neutral territory, that will ...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Journal of Combinatorial Theory
A long-standing, unsolved problem is that of finding the minimum number of crossings of the edges in a complete graph when embedded on a surface of genus zero.

Thomas Saaty, Luis Vargas
Journal: Socio-Economic Planning Sciences
We give a summary and an example of a new, systems oriented, method for estimating the input-output coefficients of a given economy. Our approach is based on pairwise comparisons among the sectors of the economy ranking them according to their priority on a ratio scale. What we obtain corresponds...

Eren Erdener, Thomas Saaty
Journal: Design Methods and Theories
A new approach to performance measurement the Analytic Hierarchy Process

James C. Frauenthal, Thomas Saaty
Journal: Two-Year College Mathematics Journal
Many mathematical models which attempt to describe problems stated in words appear trivial in hindsight. This is the case because the crucial insight needed to formulate the model is divulged by the structure of the model. It would be desirable to be able to teach this critical, inductive step in...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Mathematics and computers in simulation
Quantitative modeling of unstructured decision problems with social implications is new and challenging and has pressing needs. A new approach to scaling using largest eigenvalues and reciprocal matrices and the effect of inconsistent judgment are introduced and relevant theory discussed. In this...

Thomas Saaty
Journal: Fuzzy sets and systems
The complexity of experience acquired through our senses and as interpreted by our mind, is fuzzy and must remain so as long as the meaning of things change as they are embedded in larger or different contexts to relate them to new ideas and new experiences. Here we give a method for measuring th...