About Thomas L. Saaty

He holds the Chair of University Professor at Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh. He was previously professor at the Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania for 10 years, prior to which was in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency at the U.S. State Department for 7 years and was involved in nuclear arms reduction negotiations with the Soviets in Geneva.

He is the architect and the developer of the famous decision making tool, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and its generalization to decisions with dependence and feedback, the Analytic Network Process (ANP).

The AHP is used in both individual and group decision-making by business, industry, and governments and is particularly applicable to complex large-scale multiparty multicriteria decision problems. The ANP has been applied to a variety of decisions involving benefits, costs, opportunities, and risks and is particularly useful in predicting outcomes.

Consulting Activities:

  • Governments of France, Egypt, Sudan, Kuwait, Iran, and Tanzania
  • United Nations
  • NASA
  • Department of Defense
  • Department of the Air Force
  • National Institute of Health
  • National Bureau of Standards
  • Bureau of the Census
  • The Environmental Protection Agency
  • The Urban Institute
  • Electric Power Research Institute
  • The Alaska Department of Fisheries
  • Logistics Management Institute
  • Woods Gordon of Canada
  • U.S. Steel
  • The Ford Foundation
  • The Ford Motor Company
  • Xerox
  • Kodak
  • R.J. Reynolds
  • Westinghouse
  • American Cyanimid
  • Pan American Airlines
  • Colonial Penn Insurance
  • North American Rockwell
  • Booz Allen Applied Research

Academic Activities:

His current research is in decision-making, planning, conflict resolution and neural synthesis. He has published more than 300 articles and 33 books on decision-making, operations research, and mathematics. His non-technical book on the AHP, Decision Making for Leaders, has been translated to more than 10 languages. His other recent books are The Brain: Unraveling the Mystery of How It Works, (generalizing the ANP) and Creative Thinking, Problem Solving & Decision Making. At the Katz School he teaches Decision Making in Complex Environments, using both the AHP and the ANP and Creativity and Problem Solving.