A multi-criteria approach for urban mobility project selection in medium-sized cities

Abstract

In response to the urbanization processes and problems generated by the demand for transportation in cities, technological advances were the main factors that led to the emergence of smart cities, implying challenges for urban mobility. The literature on mobility focuses on developed countries relative to large cities, so the focus of this research is in smaller population sizes. This research aims to propose a new approach for the selection of urban mobility projects in medium-sized cities, from the perspective of intelligence and sustainability, based on multi-criteria decision-making methods. The model is composed of 43 evaluation criteria and uses the multi-criteria Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method for assigning weights to the criteria, the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method for solving the decision matrix, and the 2-tuple linguistic model for processing the qualitative information. An application of the approach is performed with four mobility projects in a medium-sized Brazilian city. The main highlight of the proposed approach is a predefined set of evaluation criteria, allowing context decision-makers to select the most appropriate criteria for the specific projects that will be evaluated.