Stochastic pairwise comparative judgements and direct ratings of alternatives in the REMBRANDT system

The REMBRANDT system for multicriteria decision analysis consists of both the multiplicative variant of the AHP (which employs a method of pairwise comparative judgements by a decision maker to arrive at final impact scores for the alternatives under consideration) and SMART, the simple multiattribute rating technique (which utilizes direct rating of alternatives to achieve final impact scores). This paper examines the effect of imprecision or uncertainty in the decision maker’s pairwise judgements or ratings of alternatives by expressing each pairwise judgement or rating as a probability distribution, and the structure of REMBRANDT’s component models is exploited to derive interval judgements or interval ratings of the alternatives’ final impact scores. These interval judgements or interval ratings can be used to determine the probability of rank reversal amongst alternatives, i.e. to assess the stability of the final impact score vector.