Using the Analytical Hierarchy Process Method to Evaluate Mobility as a Service (MaaS) Applications

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Mobility as a Service (MaaS) concept is widely discussed, but only a small number of publications consider real-world solutions and a quantified evaluation of travel-related applications. Therefore, this article aims to evaluate and rank existing MaaS services to support the development of future MaaS applications by highlighting the most relevant features. Thus, a framework of the technical aspects is created, where the aspects are categorized into routing, booking, payment, ticketing, and supplementary services. Based on the defined aspects and their sub-aspects, an evaluation of selected applications is performed in three stages by applying the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method. In the first stage, the assessment of the examined MaaS services is carried out by using a multi-criteria analysis (i.e., scoring). In the second stage, the relative importance of the aspects is weighted (i.e., weighting). The third stage is based on the ranking of MaaS services by taking the weights of the aspects into account. According to the achieved scores, the analyzed MaaS services earn only 44 percent of their potential maximum value, and the payment is the most important among the technical aspects. The applied method reveals quantified results, which provides valuable guidelines for future implementations, especially for application developers.