1. ANALYTIC HIERARCHY PROCESS AS A MULTI CRITERIA APPROACH MODEL IN DECISION MAKING AND APPLICATION OF AHP METHOD FOR SELECTION OF MINE HUNTING SHIP Barış DOĞAN, 2004

Keywords : Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Hierarchy Structuring, Sensitivity Analysis, Inconsistency, Expert Choice, Mine Hunting Ship Selection.

The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is a very popular multi criteria decision making approach. Nowadays, AHP becomes one of the essential multi-criteria decision-making methods used by managers.

The benefits of AHP are its capability to accommodate subjectivity and inconsistency in human judgments as well as its simplicity in converting a normative procedure to a decision support system through the PC-based Expert Choice program.

The AHP is well-suited to the selection problems. The feasibility of this approach is illustrated with a sample execution of the process for mine hunting ship selection. The selection problem is structured into a 4-level hierarchy: goals, criteria, sub-criteria, and alternatives. The relative weights of decision elements are then estimated by decision makers under each node of the hierarchy. After identifying the best mine hunting ship with the given weights of decision criteria, sensitivity analyses are used to examine the response of the overall priority of alternatives to changes in the relative importance of each criterion. This thesis provides evidence showing that analytic hierarchy process is effective to use for decision making.