Toward Sustainable Transportation: A Pavement Strategy Selection Based on the Extension of Dual-Hesitant Fuzzy Multicriteria Decision-Making Methods

Abstract

Pavement strategy is critical for achieving sustainable transportation. However, the presence of many evaluation criteria, criteria tradeoffs, criteria conflict, and criteria importance categorize the evaluation and selection of pavement strategies under complex multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) problems. To date, no study has presented an evaluation framework for selecting the most optimal pavement strategy to be utilized as a way to achieve sustainable transportation considering multicriteria evaluation of pavement strategies and sustainable solutions. This article presents a pavement strategy selection based on a new extension of fuzzy MCDM methods. The methodology is developed in two phases. First, the evaluation decision matrix is formulated on the basis of intersecting the “evaluation criteria” and “pavement strategies list.” Second, the proposed MCDM methods are developed: multilayer dual hesitant fuzzy weighted zero inconsistency (DH-FWZIC) to assign weights to the pavement's evaluation criteria followed by dual hesitant fuzzy decision by opinion score method (DH-FDOSM) for selecting the best pavement strategy. Four alternatives, namely, flexible/asphalt, rigid/concrete, reflective, and permeable alternatives pavement strategies, are evaluated on the basis of 30 criteria. Results show the following. 1) The multilayer DH-FWZIC method has weighted the pavement strategies’ evaluation criteria at three layers in a consistent manner, showing that a region's environment criterion has the highest final weight (0.1215) and the lowest importance value (0.0089) assigned for its windy criterion. 2) According to DH-FDOSM, the flexible/asphalt pavement achieved the first rank among the four pavement strategies. Finally, the robustness of the developed framework was assessed by conducting sensitivity analysis and comparison study.