Author: Klaus

AHP online software – a reminder

If you are a registered user of my AHP online software, please keep in mind and be aware:

After 3 months of inactivity, your user account will be deactivated automatically. Please reactivate, using the link provided in the e-mail, if you want to keep your data, otherwise your account and all your data will be deleted 48 hours after deactivation.

This is done to ensure a slim database and help to keep the software fast and responsive. Please also avoid multiple registrations under different user names and e-mail addresses. You can keep up to 20 projects in your account, and it should be sufficient for the majority of users.

AHP online program limits:

  • Number of hierarchy levels: 6 max.
  • Number of hierarchy nodes: 50 max.
  • Number of criteria/node: 15 max. ( 7 to 9 recommended)
  • Number of hierarchy end nodes: 150 max.
  • Number of Alternatives: 10 max.
  • String length for nodes/leafs: 35 char max.
  • Number of characters for hierarchy definition: 6000

Thank you for your cooperation, and PLEASE – as a registered user – help to support this website with a small donation. I do not have a commercial interest, but I spend a lot of time, sharing my knowledge for free, and I have running costs to keep the site alive.

Thank you!

Welcome to BPMSG – Mar 2016

Concepts, Methods and Tools to manage Business Performance

Dear Friends, dear Visitors,

The analytic hierarchy process AHP remains the main topic of this website and continues to have the most visitors. From October 2015 to now I received quite a number of questions related to my AHP excel template and my AHP online software. Here some of the typical questions (FAQs):

Q: Can I extend the number of participants to more than 20?
A: Though it is possible in principle, the better way is to use my AHP online software with (practically) unlimited number of participants. I will not do a further extension of the template.

Q: Do you have a version of the Excel template w/o multiple inputs?
A: Yes, a simplified version is available on request from the author.

Q: How can I cite your work, can you give me a reference?
A: Please cite my paper: Implementing the analytic hierarchy process as a standard method for multi-criteria decision making in corporate enterprises–a new AHP excel template with multiple inputs

Q: Do you support Fuzzy AHP?
A: No, I have made no provisions to support Fuzzy AHP, neither in Excel, nor in my online software.

Q: Can I use the Likert scale instead of the AHP scale?
A: No, AHP is based on the rational scale 1/9 … 1 … 9. It cannot be replaced by the Likert scale.

Q: How is the computation done, where do I find the description and formulas?
A: Please download my paper.

Q: How can I do alternative evaluation using your Excel template.
A: It is not possible. The template can only handle one category of a hierarchy and calculate the priority of one set of criteria.

Q: If I have a group of decision makers, do they need to register for the online software?
A: No, they don’t need to register. As the owner of a project you get a link for group decision inputs. Simply send them the link, and they can start the pairwise comparisons.

A couple of months ago I added a Donation button to the website – see below. Unfortunately, only a very small number of users used it, a big Thank You to them! PLEASE, help to support this website with a small donation. I have no commercial interest, but spend a lot of time, sharing my knowledge for free, and I have running costs to keep the site alive. Thank you in advance!

For now, please enjoy your visit on the site and feel free to leave a comment – it is always appreciated.

Klaus D. Goepel,

Singapore, March 2016

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 – October 2015

Concepts, Methods and Tools to manage Business Performance

Dear Friends, dear Visitors,

it’s soon coming to five years that my webpage has been online, and things getting slowly a bit messy … There was a need to clean-up the pages, posts and directories, so that the necessary maintainance will take less time, and future updates are possible. As you should know, this project is done in my free time as a hobby, I still have a full-time job for another couple of years.

Unfortunatly, during the whole process, some links were broken and it will take time to repair. Sorry, when you experience missing images or a broken link. Just let me know using my contact page. I am still working on it and plan to simplify the navigation in order  to make it easier for you to find relevant information.

AHP as one category, where you find information about the analytic hierarchy process, will stay in focus. From the start this was the nost frequently visited part of the site, and my AHP excel template slowly reaches 15 thousand (!) downloads. Under  the category Articles you find posts about other topics, mainly the concept of diversity, as I was using it for  different applications. All more personal related  topics under the category Other will move to my new personal blog – Klaus & Lita – running on my own server with topics like multicopter, programming and – maybe – cooking in future.

For now, please enjoy your visit on the site and feel free to leave a comment – it is always appreciated.

Klaus D. Goepel,

Singapore, October 2015

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.

Please give credit or a link to my site, if you use parts in your work, or make a small donation to support my effort to maintain this website.

About the author

AHP online software – how it was implemented

When I was asked just now in an e-mail, how my AHP online software operates,   I realized that I have never published a description about it. Therefore, here a short summary:

The AHP-OS software implementation is based on my AHP excel template. I have published one paper about it in 2013. All mathematical formulas used, are shown in this conference paper or in the excel template manual on the last 2 pages. The online version is realized in PHP, using OOP (object oriented programming), running on a Linux server.

The core module is the ahp class. It contains the routines to fill the decision matrix from the pairwise comparisons, to find the dominant eigenvalue using the power method, and to calculate the consistency ratio.

A second important class is the hierarchy class. It translates the text file – defining the hierarchy – into a hierarchical data array. When I implemented the software, I wanted to get a flexible tool, which can be used for all kind of hierarchical problems. This was actually more difficult than the implementation of all mathematical calculations, especially under the aspect of safety and malicious online attacks. The feature also differentiates the online version from the excel implementation. The excel template cannot handle hierarchies at all.

The third important class implements the database and its management. I use SQL with either sqlite or mysql drivers. There are 4 tables:

  • one for user management (registration, password, etc.),
  • one for projects (hierarchy data, description, session code etc.),
  • one for pairwise comparisons (participants, judgments etc.) and
  • one for handling alternatives.

The rest of classes contain supporting functions, like html in/output, excel download and consolidation for group results. I use a basically two open source packages, phpMailer and phpGraphlib, the rest is all realized by myself from scratch.

Please consider a donation, it will help me to maintain the website and program.

Update 2017: AHP-OS software implementation (pdf)

Welcome to Business Performance Management – Aug 2015

Concepts, Methods and Tools to manage Business Performance

Dear Friends, dear Visitors,

time for another update of my welcome page! Since Chinese New Year in February there have been only two minor updates of my AHP Excel template. On request of many users, it can now handle two criteria. Though there are still a few requests to increase the number of criteria to more than ten, I am not planning to extend the template, as too many pairwise comparisons have to be done, which will be troublesome for the decision makers. It is much better to further breakdown the hierarchy into additional categories.

My AHP online  software seems to be quite stable. Beside the regular user administration, I didn’t put in  more effort, and the number of active users varies between three and four hundred.

I still get regular feedback via the contact page. It seems that many of my visitors are students, using my tools in their thesis. Sometimes I am asked, whether it is allowed to use them, and the answer is “yes”. As long as you use the software and templates for non-commercial purposes, e.g. education or research, you are allowed to do so. But please give credit to the author, and make a reference to the source.

Since end of last year I started a new hobby, flying remote controlled multi-copter. The header picture of my blog shows the skyline of Singapore, taken with this type of aerial platform. It is a fascinating technology and a lot of fun. I managed to finish my first own-build project, as small miniquad, and also started to develop some simple formulas to estimate flight speed and rate of climb. More to come here!

For now, please enjoy your visit on the site and feel free to give me comment – it is always appreciated.

Klaus D. Goepel,

Singapore, August 2015

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

AHP Excel Template Version 2015-04-09

In this version I changed the minimum number of criteria from three to two; the number of criteria  ranges now from 2 to 10.

It seems in the Turkish language version of Excel the selection of the consolidated matrix (“0”) gives an error. I did some minor modifications, but I am not sure whether it is now working. Please give me your feedback.

Download the latest version of the AHP Excel Template.

Welcome to BPMSG – February 2015

Concepts, Methods and Tools to manage Business Performance

Dear Friends, dear Visitors,

time for a short update on bpmsg.com. Firstly, I wish you a healthy and successful New Year 2015, and for all of you with Chinese background: Gong Xi Fa cai – 恭喜发财, the year of the sheep is coming.

As I had a lot of other activities over the last few months, I was not very active here on my blog here, but the daily number of visitors is still increasing, and I receive feedback and questions regularly, most often about AHP. Thanks for all your comments, and please continue to give me your suggestions and ideas. My AHP online software has now more than 300 registered and active users. Please take note that users, not active for more than three month, will receive an email notification to re-activate their account within two days, otherwise their account incl. all project data will be deleted.

The latest publications, using my AHP Excel template or online software, cover areas like productivity improvement, smart TV human computer interaction, building sustainability and others. I try to keep the list of references up-to-date. Please cite my paper here, if you use my tools and plan to publish your work, and let me know about it.

Surprisingly my post about the Synology DS1513+ network attached storage (NAS) got a lot of readers. Online security seems to be an issue, and making remote online access more secure is indeed an important topic. So I opend the comment field on this post for feedback and questions.

For now, please enjoy your visit on the site and feel free to give me comment – it is always appreciated.

Klaus D. Goepel,

Singapore, February 2015

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. Please give credit or a link to my site, if you use parts in your website or blog.

About the author

How to make your Synology Disk station (NAS) more secure?

Introduction

Recently I bought the network attached storage (NAS) DS1513+ from Synology and integrated it into my home network in order to have a central place to store and access my data. This NAS has several server functions, making it convenient to access data remotely, but also making it vulnerable to unauthorized intrusion. So the question arises, how to mitigate this risk without restricting the remote functionality of the NAS. There is a lot of information available in the web; yet for me it took some time to identify and understand the most important modifications and to implement them:

  1. VPN Virtual Private Network – to remotely access the local area home network
  2. SSH Secure Shell – for secure login as root user or admin to fully access the (embedded) operating system
  3. SSL/TLS – to secure traffic between website and browser (HTTPS)
  4. Enable 2-Step Verification for DSM web access
  5. Store all critical data (certificates and private keys) on an encrypted memory card

Continue reading How to make your Synology Disk station (NAS) more secure?

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