Deriving Priorities the Alternatives in an Analytic Hierarchy Process

Abstract

The data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a mathematical programming technique, which is used for evaluating relative efficiency of decision making units (DMUs). However, the DEA does not provide more information about the efficient DMUs. Recently, some researchers have been carried out in the background of using DEA models to generate local weights of alternatives from pairwise comparison matrices used in the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). In this paper, an application of a common set of weights is used for determining priorities in the AHP. First, we determine DEA efficient alternatives as DMUs. Then, these alternatives are ranked according to the efficiency score weighted by the common set of weights in the AHP. This application is applied successfully and the result is valid and assured. A numerical example is utilized to illustrate the capability of this procedure.