What is AHP

DS/AHP was introduced in Beynon, Curry, and Morgan (2000) and Beynon (2002a), and is a nascent method of multi-criteria decision support. Following a hierarchical decision structure, similar to the analytic hierarchy process— AHP (Saaty, 1980), the identification of groups of alternatives (DAs) against the whole set of alternatives considered, over a number of different criteria, is operationalised using Dempster-Shafer theory—DST (Dempster, 1968; Shafer, 1976). As such, the utilisation of DS/AHP means the decision making is embedded with the realisation of the presence of ignorance and non-specificity in the decision judgements made (see Beynon, 2005). Studies have acknowledged that the making of decisions is often difficult because of uncertainty and conflict in the judgement making process (Shafir, Simonson, & Tversky, 1993). Nutt (1998) references that a key incumbent in decision making is complexity, which prompts difficult decisions as well as manifesting how daunting a decision may appear. The notion of ignorance prevalent within DS/AHP, from DST, has been described as a general term for incompleteness, imprecision, and uncertainty (Smets, 1991), also relating to the subjective imperfection of a decision maker (Motro & Smets, 1997).