Patent ID: 8832013

Claim:
An apparatus comprising: an analytic network process (ANP) storage memory that stores an ANP weighted supermatrix representing an ANP model populated with data, the ANP model having feedback connections in place among nodes within the ANP model; and a processor in communication with the ANP storage memory, the processor being configured to facilitate selecting one or more metrics to use to determine influence of criteria within the ANP model; determining a combined influence score using the selected one or more metrics, the combined influence score being a single score for each of the criteria throughout the entire ANP weighted supermatrix representing the ANP model that has feedback connections; and determining, based on the combined influence score for each of the criteria, which of the criteria in the ANP model is most influential among the criteria in the ANP model, for the one or more metric which is selected to use to determine the influence of the nodes in the ANP model.