An improved analytic network process based on fuzzy decision maps

Analytic network process (ANP) is a relative new multicriteria decision-making tool, which is used to deal with influences of the dependence and feedback. However, during the course of constructing the influence matrices of inner dependence, people are usually difficult to give meaningful answer because the comparison mechanism is fuzzy. To overcome the above drawback of ANP, in this paper, an improved ANP is proposed by adopting a fuzzy decision map (FDM) technology. The advantage of the improved ANP lies in it incorporates fuzzy measures to provide a flexible and realistic method for extracting the fuzzy relationships among elements of a complex system. Applied in a real case, the suggested ANP is validated to be scientific and reasonable.