Using a new parsimonious AHP methodology combined with the Choquet integral: An application for evaluating social housing initiatives

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simplified AHP methodology combined with the Choquet integral for evaluating numerous alternatives across multiple criteria, validated through experiments and a real-world social housing evaluation in Italy.

Contribution

It develops a parsimonious AHP approach that reduces pairwise comparisons and integrates the Choquet integral for criteria interaction, applicable to large decision sets.

Findings

Validated through student experiments

Successfully applied to 21 social housing projects

Enhanced decision accuracy with criteria interaction modeling

Abstract

We propose a development of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) permitting to use the methodology also in cases of decision problems with a very large number of alternatives evaluated with respect to several criteria. While the application of the original AHP method involves many pairwise comparisons between alternatives and criteria, our proposal is composed of three steps: (i) direct evaluation of the alternatives at hand on the considered criteria, (ii) selection of some reference evaluations; (iii) application of the original AHP method to reference evaluations; (iv) revision of the direct evaluation on the basis of the prioritization supplied by AHP on reference evaluations. The new proposal has been tested and validated in an experiment conducted on a sample of university students. The new methodology has been therefore applied to a real world problem involving the evaluation of 21 Social Housing initiatives sited in the Piedmont region (Italy). To take into account interaction between criteria, the Choquet integral preference model has been considered within a Non Additive Robust Ordinal Regression approach.