Software Reviews : Expert Choice Staff review Publisher: Decision Support Software,Inc.,1300 Vincent Place,McLean,VA 22101 (telephone: [phone]) Year of Publication: 1983,revised 1985 Materials: Unlocked program disk;269-page manual in 3-ring binder;slipcase Price: $495;$75 for optional EC Utilities Disk;$75 for optional Sensitivity Analysis Disk Machine Specificity: IBM PC,AT or XT and compatibles System Requirements: 256K memory;hard disk,color graphics,printer recommended Effectiveness: Excellent User-Friendliness: Good Documentation: Fair

Abstract

Not to be confused with an expert system generator, this is one of the multi-criterion decision-making packages reviewed by Benjamin Radcliff in Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring 1986) of this journal. Such packages allow decision makers to apply quantitative or subjective rankings to multiple alternatives by ranking them against multiple criteria. For example, a public project could be ranked by cost, environmental impact, affirmative action impact, and other criteria. Criteria are weighted by the program's leading the user through a set of simple verbal comparisons. Alternatives are ranked against each other by each of the weighted criteria, a task which the user accomplishes by adjusting the lengths of histogram-like bars. Not well documented and requiring a significant investment of learning time, this is nonetheless an effective package based on scholarly work by Thomas L. Saaty on analytic hierarchical processes.¹