On teaching the analytic hierarchy process
We discuss aspects of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) that we feel are important to the successful presentation of the AHP to graduate business students. We have also created a working paper that presents some of the examples and class projects that we found to be of pedagogical value. This working paper can be obtained by email from the first author (lbodin@rhsmith.umd.edu). Scope and purpose Since its inception nearly 25 years ago, the AHP has been widely used to solve a broad range of multi-criteria decision problems. Successful applications can be found in business, industry, government, and the military. The community of operations research (OR) practitioners has incorporated the AHP in its methodological tool-bag while a number of university programs include AHP in courses covering decision-making techniques or in general OR courses. Instructors new to the topic need to be concerned with how the fundamental concepts of the AHP are first presented to students. Based on our teaching experiences, we discuss our view of how key elements of the AHP should be presented in the classroom in the hope it will aid instructors to understand better the important decision-aiding framework of the AHP.
analytic hierarchy process teaching material