Introduction and comparative analysis of the multi-level parsimonious AHP methodology in a public transport development decision problem

The methodology of Parsimonious Analytic Hierarchy Process (PAHP) has been originally constructed to unburden the evaluators of an AHP survey from the numerous pairwise comparisons caused by the several alternatives in decision problems. So far, there are very few applications of PAHP and all of them referred to the last level of the decision structure; to the alternatives. This paper aims to demonstrate a multi-level PAHP based model, so how to apply the method on an arbitrary level of the decision structure. Since being a new method, another objective is to conduct a comparative analysis on the correlation of the results between AHP and multi-level PAHP models. Moreover, the new multi-level approach makes it possible to demonstrate an immanent analysis originated from AHP logic to test PAHP results, which is unique in the scientific literature for Parsimonious technique. The created model has been tested in the real-world decision problem of a Turkish big city, Mersin. Based on the test and analysis, the method can be a suitable tool in case of layman evaluations even in case of small number of criteria or alternatives. In the paper, a general application process is also proposed for other future appliers of the method.