Analytic Hierarchy Process as a Tool for Infrastructure Management

The role of infrastructure management has been continuously changing since the late 1980s. Public agencies have started to incorporate private-sector practices. These new practices include the use of customer inputs to develop new goals and policies, development of new evaluation procedures for priority programming optimization, and addition of feedback loops into infrastructure management systems. One of the new evaluation procedures adopted into infrastructure management is the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). AHP is a decision-making tool that incorporates both qualitative and quantitative factors. AHP has increased in use and popularity because of its ability to reflect the way people think and make decisions by simplifying a complex decision into a series of one-on-one comparisons. The results are then synthesized and presented as a percentage of all the options evaluated. This presentation will illustrate AHP with two examples. In the first example, AHP was used to compare fast-track concrete repair products on the basis of the priorities set by a public agency. Three fast-track concrete repair products were compared with the use of 16 criteria comprised of construction procedures and physical properties. Without field testing, AHP showed that two of the tested products were superior to the other. In the second example, AHP was used to compare seven maintenance, rehabilitation, and reconstruction strategies for asphalt pavements. This comparison was based on nine priorities compiled from a survey of road users.