AHP & ANP Theory

Analytic Networ Process - ANP

The new paradign of our times is that everything is interconnected to everything else and there is a flow of influence among those things. The connections can be physical, political, mental, spiritual, and so on.

The Analytic Network Process (ANP) is now used to capture different aspects of tacit knowledge. Elements are grouped into clusters of related factors rather than into hierarchical levels, and links are made from a parent factor in a cluster to several elements, for example, the alternatives of the decision in another cluster. They may influence the parent or be influenced by the parent with pairwise comparisons being made to establish their priorities.

A network is comprised of the clusters, elements and links. The ANP is a descriptive theory that combines these measures to match what people actually do or guides them to do better than they were previously using only qualitative thinking and hunches, and not limited to the top-down thinking of the hierarchic models. A simple network can be extended to complex multi-level models of networks of benefits, opportunities, costs and risks.