The Analytic Hierarchy Process: A Tutorial for Use in Prioritizing Forest Road Investments to Minimize Environmental Effects

Abstract

The prioritization of road maintenance projects is an important forest engineering task due to limited budgets and competing investment needs. Large investments are made each year to maintain and upgrade forest road networks to meet economic and environmental goals. Many models and guidelines are available for single-criteria analysis of forest roads, however we have found no method for multi-criteria analysis. Additionally, even single criteria approaches often rely on expert judgment to inform models of user preferences and priorities. These preferences are used to make tradeoffs between alternatives that contain data that are physical and biological, quantitative and qualitative, and measured on many different scales. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) has the potential to provide a consistent approach to the ranking of forest road investments based on multiple criteria. AHP was specifically developed to provide a consistent, quantifiable approach to problems involving multi-criteria analysis, but it has not been applied to road management. AHP is composed of four steps: the hierarchical decomposition of a problem into a goal, objectives, and sub-objectives; the use of a pairwise comparison technique to determine user preferences; the scaling of attribute values for each of the alternatives; and the ranking of alternatives. The road investment problem differs from traditional AHP applications in that potentially thousands of alternatives are compared at one time. We discuss the AHP methodology including the foundations, assumptions, and potential for use in prioritizing forest road investments to meet economic and environmental goals, drawing from an example from the Oregon State University College Forests.

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