Patent Document ID: 8423500
Application ID: 12646289
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. An apparatus comprising: an analytic network process (ANP) storage memory that stores an ANP weighted supermatrix representing an ANP model; and a processor in communication with the ANP storage memory, the processor being configured to facilitate changing priorities of a node in the ANP weighted supermatrix to be more important, and changing priorities of the node in the ANP weighted supermatrix to be less important; assessing a sensitivity of the node which was changed relative to the ANP model; and maintaining a same proportionality in the ANP weighted supermatrix for the changing of the priorities and the assessing of the relative sensitivity, the changing to be less important comprising, when 0<p 0 , defining F W,r,p 0 (p) by scaling the r th row by p p 0 , where p is a parameter value and p 0 is an initial value of p, and renormalizing the columns; the changing to be more important comprising, when p 0 <p<1, defining F W,r,p 0 (p) by leaving alone columns of W for which W r,i =0 and scaling all entries in the other columns, except for the entry in the r th row, by 1 - p 1 - p 0 ; where the ANP model M is fixed, W is a weighted supermatrix of the ANP model M whose dimensions are n×n, r is an integer fixed between 1 and n, the r th row is the row corresponding to the node, i is a column, 0<p 0 <1, F W,r,p 0 :[0; 1]→M n,n ([0, 1]) is a family F of perturbations of W in the r th row, and trivial columns are left unchanged throughout the family of row perturbations of the ANP model.