Abstract
Although the Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) has made progress towards appraising and measuring the performance of smart and sustainable transport projects, it still has important issues that need to be addressed such as the problem associated with incomparable quantities, the inherent subjective qualitative assessment, the complexity of identifying impacts to be included and its measurement method, and the corresponding weights. The issue of trading-off different sustainability criteria is the main unresolved matter. This problem may lead to lack of accuracy in the decision making process. This paper presents a new methodology to set the weights of the sustainability criteria used in the MCDA in order to reduce subjectivity and imprecision. We suggest eliciting criteria weights based on both expert preferences and the importance that the sustainability criteria have in the geographical and social context where the project is developed. This novel methodology is applied to a real case study to quantify sustainable practices associated with the design and construction of a new roadway in Spain. The outcome demonstrates that the approach to the weighting problem has significance and general application in a multi-criteria evaluation process.
Highlights
Transport systems and infrastructure construction consume large amounts of energy and industrial products
We proposed a new and transparent method for effectively assisting decision makers in determining the criteria weightings for transport project appraisal
To show the applicability of the methodology proposed in this paper, we applied it to a real road project in Spain
Summary
Transport systems and infrastructure construction consume large amounts of energy and industrial products. Despite the fact that MCDA can explicitly deal with different components of sustainability, the extensive study of multi-criteria techniques for transport projects has acknowledged issues that require further analysis including: the inherent subjective qualitative assessment, the complexity of identifying impacts to be included and its measurement method, and the obtaining of weights to criteria (Browne, Ryan 2011). The following section presents one of the most significant research needs that should be undertaken in order to improve the appraisal of transport projects when employing a multi-criteria approach: the use of weights and how these might be obtained in practice. A statistical test is conducted to evaluate the convergence of opinion for a weighting process to be deemed robust and valid For this methodology, we developed a simulation based on a cross validation technique to estimate the level of consensus among the panel of experts. The iterative process can be stopped once consensus is achieved
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