The stakeholder survey utilizes Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), which is a multicriteria decision-making method that structures a complex decision into a clear hierarchy of goal, criteria, sub‑criteria, and alternatives. Its core idea is to use pairwise comparisons—asking decision-makers to compare two elements at a time—to express judgments about relative importance or preference.

What differentiates AHP from many other methods is that the relative importance of different criteria (weighing factors) are not subject to speculation, as they can be ascertained by conducting a survey:

• AHP methodology captures human judgments directly, allowing qualitative and quantitative criteria to be compared on the same scale.
• AHP derives priorities mathematically from pairwise comparisons
• AHP includes a consistency check, which helps identify illogical or contradictory judgments and improves decision reliability.