Decision Making with the Analytic Network Process

The Analytic Network Process (ANP) developed by Thomas Saaty in his work on multicriteria decision making applies network structures with dependence and feedback to complex decision making. This book is a selection of applications of ANP to economic, social and political decisions, and also to technological design. The chapters comprise contributions of scholars, consultants and people concerned about the outcome of certain important decisions who applied the Analytic Network Process to determine the best outcome for each decision from among several potential outcomes. The ANP is a methodological tool used to organize knowledge and thinking, elicit judgments registered in both in memory and in feelings, quantify the judgments and derive priorities from them, and finally synthesize these diverse priorities into a single mathematically and logically justifiable overall outcome. In deriving this outcome, the ANP also allows for the representation of diverse opinions in the midst of discussion and debate.

Analytic Network Process (ANP) was conceived and its theoretical underpinnings were developed by T.L. Saaty. An international society on the subject now meets every 2 years under the name of ISAHP (Int'l. Symposium on the Analytic Hierarchy Process) The book will demonstrate a variety of ANP methods through a series of "real world" applications with each chapter illustrating the diversity of practical-problem-solving problems to which ANP can be successfully applied Offers psychologists, sociologists and political scientists the methodology to quantify and derive measurements for intangibles. The examples included will demonstrate ANP as an instrument they can use on a variety of types of problems Provides physical and engineering sciences with a quantitative method to link hard measurement to human values this enables researchers and engineers to interpret the true meaning of measurements made on a uniform scale of the system The usability of this book is greatly enhanced by the availability of the SuperDecisions software (www.superdecisions.com), the personal computer implementation of the ANP that is now fairly widely used by decision makers, consultants, teachers, and students in business and engineering schools Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Inhalt
The Analytic Network Process.- Forecasting the Resurgence of the U.S. Economy in 2001: An Expert Judgment Approach.- An Analytic Network Process Model for Financial-Crisis Forecasting.- Outsourcing a Firm's Application Development Group.- ANWR - Artic National Wildlife Refuge: an ANP Validation Example.- The Ford Explorer Case.- Pennsylvania High-Speed Maglev Project.- U.S. Energy Security.- Stabilizing Social Security for the Long-Term.- The Most Hopeful Outcome in the Middle East Conflict: The Analytic Network Process Approach.- The Conflict Between China and Taiwan.- U. S. Response to North Korean Nuclear Threat.- Criteria for Evaluating Group Decision-Making Methods.