Application of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for Selection of Forecasting Software

Abstract

In this paper, we described an application of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for the ranking and selection of forecasting software. AHP is a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) approach, which is based on the pair-wise comparison of elements of a given set with respect to multiple criteria. Even though there are applications of the AHP to software selection problems, we have not encountered a study that involves forecasting software. We started our analysis by filtering among forecasting software that were found on the Internet by undergraduate students as a part of a course project. Then we processed a second filtering step, where we reduced the number of software to be examined even further. Finally we constructed the comparison matrices based upon the evaluations of three “semi- experts”, and obtained a ranking of forecasting software of the selected software using the Expert Choice software. We report our findings and our insights, together with the results of a sensitivity analysis.