This book is a comprehensive summary, primarily of the author's own thinking and research, about the Analytic Hierarchy Process and decision making. It includes advanced mathematical theory and diverse applications. Fundamentals of Decision Making has all the latest theoretical developments in the AHP and new theoretical material not published elsewhere. We consider this book to be the replacement for the original book on the subject, The Analytic Hierarchy Process that was published by McGraw Hill Publishers, New York.

This book is about how to make decisions using the Analytic Hierarchy Process. The basics of the theory are described in a clear, non-technical manner with many examples. It is suitable for business leaders and also is probably the best book for introducing the AHP to students at the college and graduate level. In this fifth printing of the book the reader will find a new appendix containing real-life applications that validate the use of the fundamental scale of the AHP.

Decision making in land management involves preferential selection among competing alternatives. Often, such choices are difficult owing to the complexity of the decision context. Because the analytic hierarchy process (AHP, developed by Thomas Saaty in the 1970s) has been successfully applied to many complex planning, resource allocation, and priority setting problems in business, energy, health, marketing, natural resources, and transportation, more applications of the AHP in natural resources and environmental sciences are appearing regularly. This realization has prompted the authors to collect some of the important works in this area and present them as a single volume for managers and scholars. Because land management contains a somewhat unique set of features not found in other AHP application areas, such as site-specific decisions, group participation and collaboration, and incomplete scientific knowledge, this text fills a void in the literature on management science and decision analysis for forest resources.

The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) has been one of the foremost mathematical methods for decision making with multiple criteria and has been widely studied in the operations research literature as well as applied to solve countless real-world problems. This book is meant to introduce and strengthen the readers’ knowledge of the AHP, no matter how familiar they may be with the topic. This book provides a concise, yet self-contained, introduction to the AHP that uses a novel and more pedagogical approach. It begins with an introduction to the principles of the AHP, covering the critical points of the method, as well as some of its applications. Next, the book explores further aspects of the method, including the derivation of the priority vector, the estimation of inconsistency, and the use of AHP for group decisions. Each of these is introduced by relaxing initial assumptions. Furthermore, this booklet covers extensions of AHP, which are typically neglected in elementary expositions of the methods. Such extensions concern different numerical representations of preferences and the interval and fuzzy representations of preferences to account for uncertainty. During the whole exposition, an eye is kept on the most recent developments of the method.

This volume contains a collection of papers presented at the 15th International Conference on Multiple Criteria Decision Making held in Ankara, Turkey July 10 14, 2000. This was one of the regular conferences of the International Society on Multiple Criteria Decision Making, which are held at approximately two-year intervals. The Ankara conference had 195 participants from 38 countries. A total of 185 papers were presented at the conference. The title of our volume is MCDM in the New Millennium. The papers presented at the conference reflect the theme. We had several papers on information technology (IT) and many application papers. Of the 81 application papers presented, 14 appear in the volume. We expect more IT applications of MCDM to appear in the future, in particular in the areas of e-commerce and the internet. The conference surroundings and accomodations were excellent, and conducive to both an outstanding academic exchange, and enjoyment and a cultural broadening of participants. We had a pleasant and enjoyable outing and visit to the Anatolian Civilizations Museum. We also had an outstanding banquet at which awards were presented. The MCDM Gold Medal was presented to Professor Thomas Saaty, of the University of Pittsburgh. The MCDM Presidential Service Award was presented to ProfessorPekka Korhonen of the Helsinki School of Economics for his years of presidential service to the society. The society presented the MCDM Edgeworth-Pareto Award to Professor Alexander V. Lotov of the Russian Academy of Sciences.