A Multicriteria Model to Evaluate the Performance of Transport Companies: The Case of Tunisia

Abstract

1. IntroductionPerformance evaluation is an important means of promoting the operational efficiency and service quality of public transport system (Hsing et al., 2000). However, the criteria for evaluating the performance of transport companies are generally multiple and involve subjective assessments resulting in qualitative data.Many studies focus on economic criteria in terms of efficiency and effectiveness (Colson et al 1998; De Borger et al., 2002; Sabri et al., 2008). Some investigations focus on the quality of transport service (Toni 2013). Others focus on safety, using indicators related to the number of accidents and deaths (Tingvall et al., 2010).Despite the increasing amount of attention being paid to the evaluation of transport performance, many researchers and practitioners still fail to consider or use quantitative and qualitative criteria while doing the evaluation. In fact major studies already published in this area are focused mainly on the use of quantitative criteria. Thus, most of these studies are not able to adequately evaluate the different aspects of transport performance (Sabri et al., 2008;Colson et al., 1998; Tingvall et al., 2010; Gianfranco et al., 2014a). What this means is that current methodologies for evaluating performance are not sufficiently comprehensive, particularly when it comes to taking account different aspects of performance.Indeed the use of frontier methods for evaluating the performance of public transport (De Borger et al., 2002; Gianfranco et al., 2014a) companies can lead operators to missing results. Generally these models have their shortcomings. The shortcomings include: (a) failure to sufficiently take the goals of public transport companies - in terms of safety (number of accidents) and quality of service (comfort, cleanliness, etc.) - into account and (b) the inadequacy in using only the operational criteria of performance (efficiency and effectiveness).Our study is of paramount importance to academicians and practitioners as the proposed framework is expected to uncover many new or previously unused qualitative and quantitative criteria that address the desires, expectations and the needs of all stakeholders. The study can also be seen as an answer to the call for research seeking more investigation into transport performance evaluation problem (Hsing et al., 2000; Gianfranco et al., 2014b) by identifying appropriate performance measures.The technique adopted in the study is the multi-criteria analysis. This approach is used in decision analysis to make selections among different alternatives when a decision maker is faced with complex decision problems (De Brucker et al., 2004). Out of many different available multi-criteria decision analysis approaches, we will use desegregated multi-criteria approach in the study. The proposed methodology will also address the existing literature gap with respect to the use of performance measures or of more than one performance measure.The methodology/model and performance measure or criteria developed here will be used to assess the performance of 12 public bus companies in Tunisia, which is a practical or an important real world case.In the study, we will show that the use of multi-criteria decision analysis method can be more interesting and effective in assessing the performance of public transport. Our goal is to build a set of criteria which covers all different aspects of transport or public transport performance.This work is divided into two parts: In the first part, we propose a set of main criteria that covers different aspects of transport performance and which can be a good basis for the evaluation of transport companies' performance. In the second, we present a case study concerning twelve transport companies in Tunisia.2. Evaluation of the performance of transportation companies using Multi-criteria Decision AnalysisOf recent, researchers have shown interest in multi-criteria methods for evaluating the performance of public transport companies (Colson et al. …