The Application of Analytic Hierarchy Process to Analyze Regional Sustainable Development: A Study of Shaoyang, China

Economy, society, environment and resource interact each other and constitute a complex system. Analytical hierarchy process (AHP) is a popular and powerful method for solving different problem of complex system. This paper presents an indicator system with hierarchical structure upon AHP to evaluate the status of sustainable development as an example for Shaoyang. In this research, we (1) discuss pathways in which to build a proper hierarchical structure, (2) describe the formulation of a AHP theory to predict the weight value of each indicator in the hierarchical structure and (3) report model results based upon data about economy, society, environment and resource from 2004-2007 in Shaoyang, China. The analysis result shows that the sustainable development status become better than before from 2004-2007: Comprehensive score of economy sub-system and environment sub-system keeps increasing, by contraries, the score of society sub-system and resource carry sub-system decreased slowly.