Quantitative Decision-Making Framework to Evaluate Environmental Commitment Tracking Systems

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to evaluate the environmental commitment tracking systems (ETSs) used by other state departments of transportation (DOTs) in an effort to determine which system would be the most beneficial for long-term implementation at the Colorado DOT. The authors developed a quantitative decision-making framework to identify and prioritize the features that the Colorado DOT prefers and evaluate ETSs used by other state DOTs with respect to those features to provide recommendations as to which ETS the Colorado DOT should adopt. ETSs from California, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Washington were evaluated. The quantitative decision-making framework consists of four steps: (a) conduct interviews to identify the features that the Colorado DOT prefers to have in its ETS, (b) assign weights to those features to establish their importance relative to each other on the basis of Colorado DOT preferences by using the analytic hierarchy process, (c) collect data from the above-mentioned eight state DOTs through surveys to identify which features their ETSs have, and (d) perform a quantitative evaluation of those ETSs with their respective weights according to Colorado DOT preferences. Application of this framework identified the ETSs that are most closely correlated with Colorado DOT preferences and resulted in a number of recommendations to the Colorado DOT. Although the findings presented are specific to the Colorado DOT, the quantitative decision-making framework can be used by any DOT to evaluate an ETS.