A combination of case-based reasoning and analytic hierarchy process to support innovation in industry

This paper proposes an approach based on a combination of case-based reasoning and the analytic hierarchy process to support innovation in industry. The combination of these two methods has the objective of overcoming some of their individual weaknesses. Case-based reasoning is a method used to compute similarity between a new situation and previous stored cases, which results in a list of similar situations. The Analytic Hierarchy Process is a method used to order a set of alternatives considered as options in a decision-making process. With the proposed combination, the case-based reasoning identifies the set of alternatives to be used and ordered by the analytic hierarchy process. The approach considers group decision-making, involving actors with complementary expertise engaged in innovation processes in companies, such as product design.