Multi-entity perspective transportation infrastructure investment decision making

Abstract

Investment in new large transportation infrastructure is capital-intensive and irreversible in nature. Private sector participation in infrastructure investment has gained popularity in recent times because of scarcity of resources at the public sector, and because of the ability of the private sector to build, operate, maintain such facilities, and share future uncertainties. In such cases, there are multiple entities each with different objectives in the project. Traditional techniques used to determine feasibility of such projects and do not consider two critical elements. These are the need (1) to identify major entities involved in these projects and their individual objectives, and (2) the importance of analyzing measures of effectiveness of each entity in a multi-objective context. A framework is proposed to address these issues along with a set of relaxation policies to reflect the nature and level of participation by the entities.First, the feasibility of each single entity perspective is determined and next, a multi-objective optimization (MOO) is proposed reflecting the perspectives of all entities. The MOO results in pareto-optimal solutions to serve as tradeoff between the participation levels of the multiple entities. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used as a tool to narrow down number of options for decision makers for further consideration. AHP and MOO are integrated to determine the feasibility of strategies from multi-entity perspectives. The framework is examined on the proposed multibillion dollar international river crossing connecting the city of Detroit in the U.S. and the city of Windsor in Canada. This methodology provides a decision making process tool for large-scale transportation infrastructure investment consisting of multiple entities.