Economic, Ecological and Social Analysis Based on DEA and MCDA for the Management of the Madrid Urban Public Transportation System

Abstract

The aim of this research is to help public transport managers to make decisions on the type of buses that should compose their public transport fleet, taking into account economic, environmental and social criteria from the point of view of sustainability. This paper fills a knowledge gap by including the social dimension of sustainability in addition to the economic and environmental dimensions. The original nature of this study lies in analyzing complementarities in the structuring of an efficiency and multicriteria problem. Our research analyzes Madrid public bus system data; the problem is structured in a comparative way between two analytical methods, a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and an ELimination Et Choice Translating REality (ELECTRE) III. Our research results show that two main groups of vehicles could play a part in part the theoretical solution. The main conclusions of this research are that (a) plug-in and induction electric vehicles are not comparable to GNC and diesel–hybrid vehicles in terms of cost, pollution and service; and (b) the ELECTRE III model provides more information in solving this problem than the DEA model.