Using a new parsimonious AHP methodology combined with the Choquet integral: An application for evaluating social housing initiatives
This is an incremental improvement for decision-makers in fields like social housing evaluation, addressing computational bottlenecks in AHP.
The authors tackled the problem of applying the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to decision problems with many alternatives by proposing a parsimonious method that reduces pairwise comparisons, validated in an experiment with university students and applied to evaluate 21 social housing initiatives in Italy using the Choquet integral for criteria interactions.
We propose a development of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) permitting to use the methodology also in cases of decision problems with a very large number of alternatives evaluated with respect to several criteria. While the application of the original AHP method involves many pairwise comparisons between alternatives and criteria, our proposal is composed of three steps: (i) direct evaluation of the alternatives at hand on the considered criteria, (ii) selection of some reference evaluations; (iii) application of the original AHP method to reference evaluations; (iv) revision of the direct evaluation on the basis of the prioritization supplied by AHP on reference evaluations. The new proposal has been tested and validated in an experiment conducted on a sample of university students. The new methodology has been therefore applied to a real world problem involving the evaluation of 21 Social Housing initiatives sited in the Piedmont region (Italy). To take into account interaction between criteria, the Choquet integral preference model has been considered within a Non Additive Robust Ordinal Regression approach.