A methodology for priority setting with application to software development process

In this paper we briefly review the basic ideas behind the Analytic Hierarchy Process. Based on these ideas, we introduce the concept of comparison interval and propose a methodology based on stochastic optimization to achieve global consistency and to accommodate the fuzzy nature of the comparison process. We also discuss systems with feedback. For systems with inter-component dependence, we review the super-matrix technique. For systems with intra-component dependence, we propose a systematic approximation scheme to compute the weight vector for priority setting. Applications of software development process and a numerical example are given to illustrate our methodology and results.