Analysis of AHP Methods and the Pairwise Majority Rule (PMR) for Collective Preference Rankings of Sustainable Mobility Solutions

Abstract

The aim of this work is to give a contribution in the field of stakeholder engagement in order to reduce the widespread conflicts arising when transport plans have to be implemented and understand the role of quantitative methods to support shared decisions. We present the results of a participation experiment, with university students as stakeholders, where the AHP method was applied to derive individual priority vectors, on the basis of their judgments of preference between all couples of alternatives regarding the mobility management of their university. The aggregation of the individual judgments was done by using different methods, some derived from AHP and other derived from voting methods, such as Pairwise Majority Rule (PMR). A discussion about the results of the different methods, before and after stakeholder interaction, and from an agent-based simulation in terms of respect of the consistency condition and degree of consensus of the collective decision will provide some recommendations that can be useful to guide effective and efficient participation process.