On Prospects of Analytic Hierarchy Process Application for Freight Transportation Safety Management in Integrated Transport Systems

Abstract

Integrated transport systems are a perfect form of transportation organization, because they allow integrated use of competing modes of transport, providing a high level of transportation service at affordable prices and savings in transportation costs. With the increasing demand for such transportation, the issue of transport safety assessment is becoming more important, particularly in preservation of cargo and vehicles in each section of the transportation process. In the process of technical progress, it becomes increasingly difficult to achieve a high enough level of transport safety, which allows to ensure national security and interests in the field of transport activities. Unfortunately, transport safety management today is mainly carried out at organizational level, which needs to be supplemented with safety assessment of transport system’s objects. The development of methods for transport safety assessment remains a complex scientific task, the solving of which depends on the economic efficiency and safety of the transportation process. Since transport safety is the state of the transport system, its assessment includes the safety assessments of various transport infrastructures. Thus, there is some imaginary protection field of the object of transport infrastructure, which provides counteraction to a set of existing or perceived threats. The proposed algorithm for safe freight transportation routes development may be divided into two cyclical stages: optimal transport hub determination from the alternatives; optimal transportation route choosing between selected transport hubs. The method provides a comprehensive and rational framework for structuring a decision problem, for representing and quantifying its elements, for relating those elements to overall goals, and for evaluating alternative solutions. The practical use of the proposed approach allows at the designing stage of multimodal transportation routes to evaluate their alternatives, according to the selected criteria and take the necessary measures in order to improve transport safety.