This is the first part of an introduction to multicriteria decision making using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and its generalization, the Analytic Network Process (ANP). The discussion involves individual and group decisions both with the independence of the criteria from the alternatives as in the AHP and also with dependence and feedback in the entire decision structure as in the ANP. This part explains the Analytic Hierarchy Process, with examples, and presents in some detail the mathematical foundations. An exposition of the Analytic Network Process and its applications will appear in later issues of this journal.

We consider tasks where in order to perform them it is sufficient that one member of a group will know how to do it. We are interested in the effect of task difficulty, and variability of that difficulty, on group performance, and in particular on the marginal contribution of an additional number to the performance of groups of different size. We explore the implications of various stochastic orders over task difficulty and variability. Some intuitive conjectures are shown to be false.

In the management of unconfined aquifer systems, if the thickness of the aquifer is very small and the drawdown is relatively big, errors may arise when the superposition principle is adopted directly. In allusion to this limitation, a new management model for the management of unconfined aquifer systems called two-level response matrix method is put forward. This method is applied in groundwater resources management in Shenyang city. The managing results show that this method can, in some degree, increase the efficiency of management and decrease the risk of management.

Modern business applications are generally characterized as: distributed across many processors and/or sites, access data from multiple sources and have web-based interfaces. These applications may also involve systems or processes from multiple companies or vendor provided services. The changing business environment and technologies requires that the application be agile and adoptable in short period. Component based development has recently attracted increased attention as a preferred technology for developing business applications. However, the tools and techniques for the design, implementation, management and deployment of applications based on these technologies are at a very early stage of development. This paper presents an overview of a distributed architecture for the deployment of applications based on business components. The application of the architecture in an auto insurance claim domain is briefly described. A number of open research issues have been identified.

This paper presents a new index system for the performance evaluation and network planning of multimedia communication systems using measurement on actual systems to support several different traffic types. In this index system, we develop an expert system to evaluate the performance of such multimedia communication networks including channel utilization and call blocking probability and packet delay, and apply the network planning methods to optimize the networks and forecast the demand of the growing multimedia communications sytems. Two important planning problems for the multimedia communication systems are presented: optimization problem for construction of the world system and forecast problem for increasing traffic demands. We first discuss analysis methods, performance measures for the multimedia communication systems. Then, we describe network planning methods for the multimedia communication systems and give some efficiency network planning methods. Finally, we present some results studied in traffic forecast for the campus network and show the effectiveness of these methods.

This paper develops a new method of parametric estimate, which is named as “synthesized expected Bayesian method”. When samples of products are tested and no failur events occur, the definition of expected Bayesian estimate is introduced and the estimates of failure probability and failure rate are provided. After some failure information is introduced by making an extra-test, a synthesized expected Bayesian method is defined and used to estimate failure probability, failure rate and some other parameters in exponential distribution and Weibull distribution of populations. Finally, calculations are performed according to practical problems, which show that the synthesized expected Bayesian method is feasible and easy to operate.

In this paper, we study a single-period two-product inventory model with stochastic demands and downward substitution. The optimal order quantities are presented and some properties are provided. Comparing with newsboy model, we prove that both the profit and the fill rate can be improved by using the substitution policy.