This book addresses the issue of how to structure a complex situation, identify its criteria and other factors whether intangible or concrete, measure the interactions among them in a simple way, and synthesize all the information to obtain priorities by using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The priorities can then be used in a benefit/cost setting to develop portfolios of activities, one of the major concerns of organizations today.
Thomas L. Saaty is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches at the Pitt Graduate School of Business. He is best-known as being the modern mathematician who figured out a way to measure intangibles, and is the inventor, architect, and primary theoretician of the Analytic Hierarchy Process, a decision-making framework used for large-scale, multiparty, multi-criteria decision analysis, and of the Analytic Network Process, its generalization to decisions with dependence and feedback.