An improved ranking approach to AHP alternatives based on variable weights

The conventional analytic hierarchy process (AHP) has the drawback of its invariabe weights system (IWS) and the composite ranking approaches based on IWS, incapable of refelecting intrinsic characteristics of complex evaluation issues, such as nonlinearity, emergence, etc. To overcome the above drawback, with the idea of weight varying adopted, an improved ranking approach to AHP alternatives based on variable weights is given by the way of constructing a variant analysis structure of AHP evaluating problems and its corresponding value system for evaluating alternatives. Compared with the conventional AHP, not only does the improved approach adopt the variant analysis structure and the new extracting way for experts’ information, which can better reflect the characteristics such as emergence and nonlinearity, but also in essence it well solves the AHP rank reversal problem and concept definitions of adopted weights are clear as well. Applied to a real example, the improved approach is validated to be applicable.