Engineering Classification of Jointed Rock Mass Based on Connectional Expectation: A Case Study for Songta Dam Site, China

Table 5

The fundamental scale of AHP (Saaty [36]).

Intensity of importance	Definition	Explanation
1	Equal importance	Two activities contribute equally to the objective
2	Weak	—
3	Moderate prevalence of one over another	Experience and judgment slightly favor one activity over another
4	Moderate plus	—
5	Strong or essential prevalence	Experience and judgment strongly favor one activity over another
6	Strong plus	—
7	Very strong or demonstrated prevalence	An activity is favored very strongly over another; its dominance demonstrated in practice
8	Very very strong	—
9	Extremely high prevalence	The evidence favoring one activity over another is of the highest possible order of affirmation
Reciprocals of above	If activity i has one of the above nonzero numbers assigned to it when compared with activity j, then j has the reciprocal value when compared with i	A reasonable assumption
Rational	Ratios arising from the scale	If consistency were to be forced by obtaining n numerical values to span the matrix