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Review of the Draft Analysis of Supplemental Treatment Approaches of Low-Activity Waste at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation Review #2 (2018) / Chapter Skim
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5 The Analytic Hierarchy Process and Expert Elicitation
Pages 35-38

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From page 35...
... However, the committee emphasizes that the following observations and findings regarding how the FFRDC needs to craft a useful comparative analysis section reflects the consensus views of the entire committee, not just those who observed the AHP. Based on the direct observations of the AHP exercise and the resulting discussion in the draft report, the committee believes that the exercise was conducted in good faith, without motivational biases, and without any effort to skew the results toward a particular conclusion.
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From page 36...
... The preference elicitation process of AHP is not well suited to supporting decisions on major policies because its ranking outcomes lack transparency regarding the trade-offs that are implicitly being made. A more transparent way of supporting a public policy decision would be for the experts to present information about key options and their respective key criteria in a direct and comparative manner, enabling the decision/policy-makers to understand the nature and extent of the trade-offs faced, and to be able to articulate the justification for their decisions in terms of the trade-offs they consider to be in the public interest.
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From page 37...
... Thus, while the FFRDC's AHP exercise has been characterized as "expert elicitation," the committee notes that it was not a traditional expert elicitation, which is a set of formal procedures to help experts extract from their professional knowledge and experience a subjective judgment about the potential range over which the true value of some parameter or future outcome may fall. Uncertainty was not what was elicited, but merely a "best point estimate." The fact that the point estimate needed to be only a score of 1 to 5 exacerbates the inappropriate precision that is usually associated with any point estimate on an unknown value, but the scores are nevertheless deterministic values without accompanying uncertainty ranges.
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From page 38...
... Recommendation 5-2 While ranking alternative approaches according to individual criteria, as the FFRDC has done in the draft report, may inform the decision-maker, the FFRDC's final report should refrain from attempting or presenting a single or unified ranking of alternatives, or assigning priorities or weights to the criteria -- and thus avoid supplanting the role of the decision-maker.
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Key Terms

  • uncertainty ranges
  • ahp process
  • slaw options
  • english summaries
  • plain english

  • expert elicitation
  • numerical calculations
  • policy decision
  • useful comparative
  • hierarchy process

  • ahp exercise
  • comparative analysis
  • analytic hierarchy
  • analysis section
  • input uncertainty

  • personal decision
  • major policies
  • central questions
  • assigning priorities
  • river site

  • concerns exist
  • little information
  • including slaw
  • questions outlined
  • direct comparison

  • direct observations
  • hierarchically arranged
  • factors identified
  • attribute differences
  • unified ranking


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