Which of DEA or AHP can best be employed to measure efficiency of projects?

Abstract

This paper compares Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approaches for monitoring projects, in order to determine their performance in terms of economic, environmental and social organizational goals. This work is founded on an existing methodology to select and monitor projects based on DEA, and discusses modifications and additions arising from using AHP. The proposal is applied to a real case. The results indicate that AHP constitutes an insightful approach in situations requiring a modelling of managerial preferences regarding the relative importance of organizational goals.