Optimized AHP to Overcome Limits in Weight Calculation: Building Performance Application

Multicriteria decision making methods, in particular the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), are widely used in many sectors, and increasingly in the field of construction. The AHP is easily adaptable to many decision problems, but it presents great difficulties when the number of criteria or alternatives is large. This issue affects the consistency of the judgment matrix, which is related to the acceptability of the results. To overcome such a drawback of basic importance in the construction field, this paper proposes a novel optimized-AHP (O-AHP) method that redefines the judgment assignments and the generation of the judgment matrix by using a mathematical programming formulation. The validation benchmark tests show that the O-AHP exhibits the same effectiveness of the standard AHP, and it can be applied successfully when the number of alternatives is more than nine. Furthermore, the presented technique is applied to the building performance assessment in the field of antiseismic behavior. The results show that the O-AHP is an approach to simplify the decision-maker operations by defining a numerical value of the building pathology criticality index, which is useful for large-scale applications.