Comparison of Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Techniques for the Location of Multi-Modal Terminals in an Integrated Public Urban Transport System

Abstract

Multiple actors from both private and public sectors are currently involved in the design and operation of urban passenger transport systems seeking at optimizing their own objectives. Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques actually aid this process. In this chapter, the authors consider the problem of locating multimodal terminals of an integrated public passenger transport system (IPPTS). A case study for the city of Bogota, Colombia is evaluated. Majority of works in MCDM does not explicitly justify the choice of the applied technique. This chapter applies three different techniques, AHP (analytic hierarchy technique), ELECTRE II (elimination and choice expressing the reality), and CRITIC (criteria importance through intercriteria correlation), to solve problem. A feature of this study is that traditional economic and logistic criteria are evaluated together with environmental and social criteria not previously evaluated in the literature. Numerical results show that each multi-criteria approach may prefer a different alternative, depending on the intrinsic behavior of each technique.