Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Weighted Scoring Method (WSM), and Hybrid Knowledge Based System (HKBS) for Software Selection: A Comparative Study

Multi criteria decision making (MCDM) methods help decision makers to make preference decision over the available alternatives. Evaluation and selection of the software packages is multi criteria decision making problem. Analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and weighted scoring method (WSM) have widely been used for evaluation and selection of the software packages. Hybrid knowledge based system (HKBS) approach for evaluation and selection of the software packages has been proposed recently. Therefore, there is need to compare HKBS, AHP and WSM. This paper studies and compares these approaches by applying for evaluation and selection of the software components. The comparison shows that HKBS approach for evaluation and selection of the software packages is comparatively better than AHP and WSM with regard to (i) computational efficiency (ii) flexibility in problem solving (iii) knowledge reuse and (iv) consistency and presentation of the evaluation results.