Analytical Hierarchy Process Approach to Rank Measures for Structural Complexity of Conceptual Models

This paper presents the result of a controlled experiment conducted to determine the relative importance of some measures, identified in research, for the structural complexity of entity-relationship (ER) models. The relative importance amongst these measures is calculated by applying the analytical hierarchy process approach. The results reveal that the number of relations in an ER diagram are of the highest importance in measuring the structural complexity in terms of understandability, analyzability and modifiability; whereas, the number of attributes do not play an important role. The study presented here can lead to developing quantitative metrics for comparing the quality of alternative conceptual models of the same problem