Title: A rule-based approach for dynamic analytic hierarchy process decision-making

Authors: Yun-Ning Liu; Shiow-Yang Wu

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Dong Hwa University, No. 1, Sec. 2, Da Hsueh Rd., Shoufeng, Hulien, Taiwan ' Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Dong Hwa University, No. 1, Sec. 2, Da Hsueh Rd., Shoufeng, Hulien, Taiwan

Abstract: The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is widely used in many multi-criteria decision-making problems and has been successfully applied to many practical cases. However, the AHP is time-consuming and the decision model is not agile enough for fast changing environment. To overcome this weakness, we develop a rule-based approach for dynamic AHP decision-making in changing environment. We analyse critical factors in the AHP decision process under uncertainty and propose to encode expert knowledge for change handling using event-condition-action rules. We propose a theorem and associated method to determine the change in ordering of decision alternatives based on event-condition-action rule-induced weight updates. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using a case study of the supplier selection decision-making task of the steel and iron industry in Taiwan. The study shows that our mechanism can effectively reach the same level of decision quality as expert decision maker(s).

Keywords: dynamic rule-based AHP; two criteria analysis; steel and iron industry; comparison matrix.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIDS.2020.104994

International Journal of Information and Decision Sciences, 2020 Vol.12 No.1, pp.36 - 74

Received: 03 Oct 2017
Accepted: 09 Sep 2018
Published online: 10 Feb 2020 *

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