Power backup system selection decisions

Summary form only given. In public institutions, the decision making process is complex as it goes through a bureaucratic system up to the person in charge of execution. Furthermore, the process becomes even harder when a number of technologies are involved. This was the situation that Portland State University Office of Information Technology (PSU-OIT) faced when the institution was purchasing an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system 4 years ago. PSU top management had to allocate resources within the institution´s budget according to the OIT department´s proposal. Within budget constraint, the OIT Department had to formulate UPS requirements according to their network and communication needs and send these requirements to different UPS suppliers for the bidding process. After receiving the demand formulation, these suppliers, in turn, informed the OIT department of the best UPS they could supply. Then, came the toughest stage of selecting that offer which was supposed to be the best according to the PSU network needs. This is the stage that is of interest in this report.The paper contains a discussion of uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and the decision structuring and decision analysis techniques of the analytic hierarchical process (AHP). It is interesting to note that AHP is not considered a traditional decision analysis tool, as it is not based on strictly quantitative methods that use expected utility as the criterion for identifying the preferred decision alternative Despite the controversial issues AHP has still remained a multi-attribute decision making tool