Application of Analytic Hierarchy Process for Relative Importance Determination of Internet of Things Standardization
As one of recent issues in the information and communication industry, internet of things has attracted attention to provide intelligent infrastructure services which connect and share data and information between real and virtual world. According to the development of these internet of things technologies, types of machines, telecommunication devices, and terminals are increasing tremendously. In this situation, connectivity and interoperability between internet of things components are important issues to build a hyper connected society. To visualize this society, it is important to set up and develop information and communication technology (ICT) standards among stakeholders. However, under limited budget and human resources, it is essential to rank standardization work items for setting standards with respect to efficiency. The purpose of this study is to provide a method for setting standardization strategies within group decision making. As a multi-criteria group decision making tool, analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is adopted and applied to determine the priorities of setting work items. The proposed method first defines decision making problem with objective, criteria, and alternatives which produces a hierarchy consisting of upper and lower criteria. Then, pairwise comparisons of academy and public sector experts are performed with respect to their relative meaning and importance. Individual surveys of expert groups are collected and summarized to determine relative criteria importance measures. Furthermore, to deliver reliable importance criteria measures, differences between academy and public sector expert groups are compared and tested using Mann-Whitney non-parametric test. The results are illustrated for useful guidelines to practical group decision making in standardization strategy establishments.