Application of Analytical Hierarchy Process to Analyse Delay in Commercial Construction Project in Nashik City

Abstract

The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is a structured technique for organizing and analyzing complex decisions, based on mathematical analysis. It has copious applications in group decision making and is used around the world in a wide variety of decision situations, in fields such as government, business, industry and education. The main feature of AHP is its inherent capability of systematically dealing with a vast number of intangible and non-quantifiable attributes, as well as with tangible and subjective factors. To simplify the critical situations by analyzing the parameters affecting the selection, the ‘Analytic Hierarchy Process’ is utilized.

Introduction

Summary:

The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), developed by Thomas L. Saaty in the 1970s, is a structured multi-criteria decision-making tool that helps analyze complex decisions by breaking them into a hierarchy and assigning numerical priorities through pairwise comparisons. It is widely used globally in government, business, industry, and education, particularly for group decision-making and prioritization.

Objectives:

• Understand AHP fundamentals and its application.

• Identify factors causing delays in construction.

• Develop an AHP model to evaluate these delay factors.

• Recommend improvements based on findings.

Methodology:
AHP involves defining the problem, structuring it into a hierarchy (goals, criteria, alternatives), performing pairwise comparisons, synthesizing weights, and checking consistency using eigenvalues and consistency ratios.

Data Collection:
The study focuses on identifying and ranking 27 factors causing construction delays in India’s rapidly developing Nashik city. Data were collected via a structured questionnaire from 30 experienced project managers working on major residential projects.

Findings:

• Pairwise comparison matrices were constructed at multiple levels (Consultant, Contractor, Materials, Equipment, Owner, Labour).

• The consistency ratios for the judgments were acceptable (below 0.1), validating the reliability of the evaluations.

• Key delay causes were analyzed within each category, such as delays in approval and responses by engineers (Consultant), poor coordination and payment delays (Contractor), and material shortages.

The study ultimately developed a hierarchical AHP model quantifying the relative impact of these factors on construction delays, providing a rational basis for prioritizing areas of improvement.

Conclusion

Above illustrated work proposes diverse applications of AHP in the problems associated with the Indian construction industry, more precise with Nashik. The use of this appealing multi-criterion technique contributes to the rationalisation of entire decision process. The AHP is preferred for its simplicity and transparency in multi-criterion choice situations. Along with the applications in this work, many real world applications have proved that AHP is a valuable tool for dealing with complex issues as it allows the decision makers to decompose the decision problem to its constituent parts. Pertaining to the work executed here by we can derive plentiful conclusions however the most noteworthy one evolves to be the nature of criterions that truly influence the various properties of decision problem, contrarily some of these criterions are certainly not considered being intangible. Merely the tangible or objective criterions are contemplated being measurable or dimensional. Though these tangible criterions form straightforward data for calculations, the intangible criterions should not be neglected as they are having imperative impact on decision problem. So the solution may be the adaptation of these intangible criterions in the form of category grading which gives a numeric value.

References

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Copyright

Copyright © 2025 Miss. P. D. Sonawane, Dr. M. C. Aher. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.