I am wondering if it is possible to simulate an AHP model and how it can be done. Any tools? I am looking at a list of lean, agile and green practices that help to minimise production costs, improve sales and profits. Many thanks for your responses.
Dear Chinonso AHP is a Decision-Making and Ranking Tool based on expert judgement elicitation between pairs of alternatives. There are some key issues regarding suitable AHP application. The first one is to define a hierarchy that higher level is the objective that you are trying to get.
If I understand you well I believe that your objective or goal is Improve Productivity of some kind of organizations. Then the second level will be build with the criteria that you need to fulfill in order to acomplish your goal. In your case I suggest: Producton Costs (better if them are lower), Sales or Market Share (more are better), Profits (more are better). In the third level there are the set of alternatives that you will rank or wtihin you will select the best one. In your case it seems that a renking of the list of practices (lean, agile and green ones).
In a traditional sense you will ask experts in order to judge between each pair of alternatives considering a particular criteria until you get a full pairwise comparison matrix for each criteria (a n-square matrix whose row and columns are the n-alternatives , i,.e. the different practices that you are ranking).
Once you have the matrices you will get a nx1 vector of normalized weights that ranking each alternative regarding each criteria. Obviously you will need to repeat the process at the criteria level, i.e. get a pairwise comparison matrix regarding the importnce of each of the criteria regarding the fulfillment of the goal (in this hypothetical case a 3x3 matrix)
Now, you are worried about simulate the AHP model, but what do simulate means in this approach? the only that could be simulated are the expert judgemnts itself. Then the unique idea that come to my mind is to simulate the experts by means of intelligent agents or expert systems whose rules of thought where supported by an extensive literature research. Normally when you choose to use AHP you pretend to contact experts in order to elicit their pairwise opinions.
In Summary, the big picture of the problem that you try to dealing with it is suitable to AHP Method but is very easier if you draw on actual oinion of real experts, if your background or your interest are more computation-oriented then simulate the expert knowledge could be a very interesting subject for research
