Research on constructing synthetic matrix in analytic hierarchy process

This paper presents a new method for constructing the synthetic matrix which is obtained by extending the given judgement matrices in the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The consistency relationship among the given matrices and their synthetic matrix is studied. The method can be used to deal with situations where the number of the given alternatives is larger than nine, and needs less pairwise comparisons than any others. Thus it will aid in the design of the AHP, which will reduce the information overload of decision maker, a major drawback of the original AHP algorithm. Finally, a numerical example is given to show the feasibility and effectiveness of the method.