State-of-the-art on analytic hierarchy process in the last 40 years: Literature review based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modelling

Although there are several articles that have carried out a systematic literature review of the analytical hierarchy process (AHP), many of them work with a limited number of analyzed documents. This article presents a computer-aided systematic literature review of articles related to AHP. The objectives are: (i) to identify AHP usage and research impact in different subject areas; (ii) to identify trends in the popularity of the AHP from the first introduction of the method in 1980 to the present; (iii) to identify the most common topics related to AHP and topic development over time. We process 35,430 documents related to AHP, published between 1980 and 2021, retrieved from the Scopus database. We provide detailed statistics about research interest, research impact in particular subject areas over the analyzed time period. We use Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) using Gibbs sampling to perform topic modeling based on the corpus of abstracts. We identify nine topics related to AHP: Ecology & Ecosystems; Multi-criteria decision-making; Production and performance management; Sustainable development; Computer network, optimization and algorithms; Service quality; Fuzzy logic; Systematic evaluation; Risk assessment. We also present the individual topics trends over time and point out the possible future direction of AHP.