Application of Extended AHP to the Analysis of User's Acceptance of Environment-friendly Car.

The multicriteria decision making problems often include both quantitative and qualitative factors simultaneously. To solve such problems, it is better to use objective values for quantitative factors as much as possible, to use subjective judgments only for qualitative factors to carry out evaluations respectively, and then to work out a comprehensive evaluation using these evaluations. In this paper, an extended AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) for integrating quantitative and qualitative evaluations is proposed. Because the alternative priorities on quantitative criteria are formed not by human’s judgments but by the ratios of the alternative values on criteria, and there is no inconsistency problem of pairwise comparison matrix in quantitative evaluation, the accuracy and the reliability of the evaluation is improved. The comprehensive evaluation matrix is composed of the priorities on quantitative and qualitative criteria. The columns of the matrix are ratios of quantities which have different units and represent the priorities on different criteria. The final priorities are obtained by multiplying the matrix with the weights of each criterion. An example using the extended AHP to evaluate user’s acceptance of an environment-friendly car is given. For building pairwise comparison matrices, we designed a questionnaire and carried out an investigation.