Klaus – BPMSG

Welcome to BPMSG – Jan 2021

Dear Friends, dear Visitors,

Thank you for visiting BMPSG; another six months passed and – probably due to Covid 19 – the interest in my online tools for business performance management and the Analytic Hierarchy Process is not declining.

My free AHP online software AHP-OS gained popularity. I haven’t made major modifications, but I am pleased to announce the addition of the Spanish language version. Just click on “Español” on the entry page, and all text output will be in Spanish. I appreciate this contribution from Gregorio, who made the effort to translate the English text files! Any other language translation is welcome, if you want to contribute, please contact me.

When using the software, please make a reference to my paper published in IJAHP about AHP-OS from 2018.

In the last couple of months I shifted my focus from (AHP) software development using PHP to other software developments using Python, yet I will maintain AHP-OS in future. Please let me know if you discover any bugs.

Many thanks to all donors, supporting this website, please continue to support my effort with a small donation, especially when you use my free templates or online software. Over the last 3 years donations were barely sufficient to finance my running costs.

For now, please enjoy your visit on the site and feel free to leave me a comment – it is always appreciated. And keep in mind: Better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.

Klaus D. Goepel, Singapore, Jan 2021

BPMSG stands for Business Performance Management Singapore. As of now, it is a non-commercial website, and information is shared for educational purposes. Please see licensing conditions and terms of use.

About the author

Welcome to BPMSG – July 2020

Dear Friends, dear Visitors,

After a full year without any update to this entry page, it is time to say a few words about the current status.

Over the last years my free AHP online software AHP-OS gained popularity; as of now I have more than 12 thousand registrations and more than one thousand active users. It seems, the software – in its latest version from Sep 2019 – is quite stable. I only receive very few bug reports and a few suggestions for improvements. When you use the software, please make a reference to my paper published in IJAHP about AHP-OS from 2018.

Recently I received feedback on my Diversity calculator Excel template. It can be used to analyze consensus among decision makers using the AHP consensus indicator based on Shannon alpha and beta entropy.

There was a correction in the calculation of the consensus indicator, not yet implemented in the diversity calculator template. With the latest version this now has been updated too.

In the last couple of months I shifted my focus from (AHP) software development using PHP to other software development using Python, yet I will maintain AHP-OS in future. Please let me know if you find any bugs.

Many thanks to all donors, supporting this website, please continue to support my effort with a small donation, especially when you use my free templates or online software.

For now, please enjoy your visit on the site and feel free to leave a comment – it is always appreciated. And keep in mind: Better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.

Klaus D. Goepel, Singapore, July 2020

About the author

Welcome to BPMSG – July 2019

Concepts, Methods and Tools to manage Business Performance

Dear Friends, dear Visitors,

We released a major update of my free AHP online software. It is now running under PHP 7 and should be noticeable faster than before. Beside some under-the-hood improvement a few new features were added. For more details read my post here.

As a new tool on my website I added a collection of my literature about multi-criteria decision making and AHP. It is available for everyone under the menu point Tools -> Literature. I am using the open source software package Wikindx5. You can browse or search for articles, authors, journals etc. Over time I will fill it up with more article and other research contributions. You can also register as a user and add your own literature to share with others.

Wikindx allows to include citations into a blog. As an example, the following reference is taken from Wikindx:

Many thanks to all donors, supporting this website. Unfortunately, over the last months I didn’t receive many donations. The annual invoice from my hosting provider is expected to come soon, therefore, please continue to support my effort with a small donation, especially when you use my free template or online software.

For now, please enjoy your visit on the site and feel free to leave a comment – it is always appreciated. And keep in mind: Better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.

Klaus D. Goepel, Singapore, July 2019

About the author

AHP-OS Update July 2019

After many hours of work, I released a new version of my free AHP online system AHP-OS. The whole package was restructured in preparation to make it available for an installation on any other web server.

Beside a lot of under-the-hood improvements, the software now runs under php 7.2 and sqlite 3.10. It should be faster than before. I also prepared to switch from sqlite to MariaDB 10 SQL database, as the number of users is increasing steadily, and the sqlite file getting larger and larger.

New Features

For you, as a user, an additional feature has been implemented. You can now close a project for further pairwise comparison inputs. Once closed, participants can no longer input data.

Message for participants, when the project is closed

The project status can be toggled between open/closed in the project administration menu.

Project Administration Menu: additional button *Toggle Project Status* on the right.

The project status is shown in your AHP project list as 1 – open, 0 – closed.

As a project author you can now also start pairwise comparisons directly from the Project administration Menu.

Start pairwise comparisons for your project with *PWC Input*.

New Web Address

AHP-OS can now be easily accessed via the subdomain ahp.bpmsg.com . The package was moved from bpmsg.com/academic to bpmsg.com/ahp. If you have bookmarked the old address, you will be automatically redirected.

AHP Alternative Evaluation – Weighted Sum or Weighted Product Model?

In AHP the preference P_i of alternative A_i is usually calculated using the weigthed sum model (WSM), i.e. calculation of global priorities for alternatives results from the additive aggregation of local preferences and criteria weights.

In my online software AHP-OS users can also select the weighted product model (WPM), where alternatives are aggregated using the product instead of the sum (Goepel 2018). We call this – in contrast to the classical (additive) AHP – multiplicative AHP or MAHP.

AHP-OS Group Result Menu: tick the wpm box and refresh to get the MAHP results.

Ishizaka, Balkenborg and Kaplan (2011) have shown that the additive AHP will overrate alternatives with extreme ratings and penalize balanced ones. Bafahm and Sun (2019) examine in their paper some abnormal results of AHP, contradictory to common expectations and basis decision-making logic in very simple cases. These conflicting results can be easily avoided using WPM.

Krejci and Stoklasa (2018) clearly show in their paper the superiority of using the weighted product model over the weighted sum model for the purpose of deriving global priorities of alternatives.

Aggregation of local priorities of alternatives into global priorities in AHP should not be done using the weighted sum model (WSM). Instead, the Weighted Product Method (WSM) should be used.

Literature

Bafahm A., Sun M. (2019). Some Conflicting Results in the Analytic Hierarchy Process, International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making Volume 18, Issue 02 (March 2019) Pages:419–443 https://doi.org/10.1142/S0219622018500517

Goepel, K.D. (2018). Implementation of an Online Software Tool for the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP-OS). International Journal of the Analytic Hierarchy Process, Vol. 10 Issue 3 2018, pp 469-487 https://doi.org/10.13033/ijahp.v10i3.590

Ishizaka A., Balkenborg D., Kaplan T. (2011). Influence of aggregation and measurement scale on ranking a compromise alternative in AHP. Journal of the Operational Research Society (2011) 62: 700. https://doi.org/10.1057/jors.2010.23

Krejci J., Stoklasa J. (2018). Aggregation in the analytic hierarchy process: Why weighted geometric mean should be used instead of weighted arithmetic mean. Expert Systems with Applications Volume 114, 30 December 2018, Pages 97-106 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2018.06.060

Welcome to BPMSG – March 2019

Dear Friends, dear Visitors,

here is the link to the ISAHP 2018 papers and authors. From there you might download my presentation Implementation of an Online Software Tool for the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP-OS). It is a short conference paper about my free AHP online software, the complete article – showing was published as

Goepel, K.D. (2018). Implementation of an Online Software Tool for the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP-OS). International Journal of the Analytic Hierarchy Process, Vol. 10 Issue 3 2018, pp 469-487

https://doi.org/10.13033/ijahp.v10i3.590

My second contribution was a presentation about Judgment Scales of the Analytical Hierarchy Process –The Balanced Scale. As above, it is a short part of a pubication about AHP scales:

Goepel, K.D. (2018). Comparison of Judgment Scales of the Analytical Hierarchy Process — A New Approach. International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making, published Dec 11, 2018

https://doi.org/10.1142/S0219622019500044

Over the last couple of months my AHP excel template was updated to show errors for the resulting weights based on the work of Tomashevskii (2014, 2015). You find more details in my post from September 2018. I still have to implement the same calculation into AHP-OS.

For now, please enjoy your visit on the site and feel free to leave a comment – it is always appreciated. And keep in mind: Better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.

Klaus D. Goepel, Singapore, March 2019

About the author

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Author: Klaus D. Goepel, BPMSG, Contact

AHP-OS and AHP Judgment Scales – Published Articles

My latest articles related to AHP:

AHP-OS:

Goepel, K.D. (2018). Implementation of an Online Software Tool for the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP-OS). International Journal of the Analytic Hierarchy Process, Vol. 10 Issue 3 2018, pp 469-487

https://doi.org/10.13033/ijahp.v10i3.590

https://www.ijahp.org/index.php/IJAHP/article/view/590/652

AHP Judgment scales:

Goepel, K.D. (2018). Comparison of Judgment Scales of the Analytical Hierarchy Process — A New Approach. International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making, published Dec 11, 2018

https://doi.org/10.1142/S0219622019500044

AHP Excel Template Update Version 2018-09-15

A new version of of the AHP Excel template with some major updates is now available for download. Based on the work of Tomashevskii (2014, 2015), errors for the resulting priorities/weights are shown.

Calculated weights with error indication

In addition the overall dissonance (ordinal inconsistency) according to Sajid Siraj (2011) is indicated. The zip file for download also contains the updated manual, showing the calculations and references.

Continue reading AHP Excel Template Update Version 2018-09-15

AHP Excel Template Update Version 2018-08-22

In this latest version of the template, the balanced scale was replaced by the generalized balanced scale (balanced-n), and the adaptive scale was added. The maximum number of iterations for the power method was increased from 12 to 20.

If you need inputs for more than 20 participants, please contact the author. A version for up to 225 participants is available.

Go to download page.

For more information about AHP scales, please read my paper Comparison of Judgment Scales.

Welcome to BPMSG – July 2018

Concepts, Methods and Tools to manage Business Performance

Dear Friends, dear Visitors,

the international symposium on the Analytic Hierarchy Process ISAHP 2018 in Hongkong is just finished, and I gave two presentations in the track Multi-criteria Decision Analysis – Methodology and Theory. One about the AHP balanced scale, and the other about the implementation of my AHP online software AHP-OS.

I’m thankful to the program committee to have received the most innovative idea reward for the paper about AHP-OS.

Some interesting papers were presented, for example Cardinal and Ordinal Inconsistency in pairwise Comparison Matrices by Konrad Kulakowski, or Coherency: an Innovation to Test Data Quality and Reduced Comparisons in the ANP by Orrin Cooper, just to mention two.

I will update you with the link, once the conference proceedings are published.
The conference gave participants also an opportunity for many discussions and the exchange of ideas.

Please continue to support my effort, either with a donation, or a rating to my web posts, which will help me as a feedback to my work.

For now, please enjoy your visit on the site and feel free to leave a comment – it is always appreciated. And don’t forget: Better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.

Klaus D. Goepel,

Singapore, July 2018

About the author