Priest: A Tool to Estimate Priorities from Inconsistent Judgments

Pair wise comparison (PC) is a well-established method to assist decision makers in estimating their preferences. This paper presents an open-source priority estimation tool (PriEsT) that has been developed to offer new features related to the PC method. PriEsT is able to assist decision makers (DMs) in revising their judgments based on different consistency measures and graphical aids. When inconsistency cannot be improved due to practical limitations, PriEsT offers a wide range of Pareto-optimal solutions based on multi-objective optimization, unlike other tools which offer only a single solution. DMs have the flexibility to select any of these non-dominated solutions according to their requirements. Using PriEsT, DMs can also perform Sensitivity Analysis to analyze how sensitive the solution is to changes in input data. The features of PriEsT have been demonstrated and evaluated via a real-world case study: an application to select the most appropriate Telecom infrastructure for rural areas. In the case study, the use of PriEsT has highlighted the presence of intransitive judgments in the acquired data. It has been found that correcting these judgments leads to a different ranking of the available alternatives. The generated solutions have also been tested for their sensitivity against small changes in the judgments.