A DEMATEL-Based Completion Method for Incomplete Pairwise Comparison Matrix in AHP

TL;DR

This paper introduces a DEMATEL-based method to complete incomplete pairwise comparison matrices in AHP, enabling more effective decision-making with low computational cost and clear interpretability.

Contribution

A novel DEMATEL-based approach for completing incomplete AHP matrices, providing physical meaning and computational efficiency.

Findings

Effective completion of incomplete matrices demonstrated

Low computational cost achieved

Applicable to various multi-criteria decision-making scenarios

Abstract

Pairwise comparison matrix as a crucial component of AHP, presents the prefer- ence relations among alternatives. However, in many cases, the pairwise comparison matrix is difficult to complete, which obstructs the subsequent operations of the clas- sical AHP. In this paper, based on DEMATEL which has ability to derive the total relation matrix from direct relation matrix, a new completion method for incomplete pairwise comparison matrix is proposed. The proposed method provides a new per- spective to estimate the missing values with explicit physical meaning. Besides, the proposed method has low computational cost. This promising method has a wide application in multi-criteria decision-making.