A hybrid MCDM method for route selection of multimodal transportation network

Abstract

Multimodal movements are those in which two or more different transportation modes are linked end-to-end in order to move freight and/or people from point of origin to point of destination. Computational efficiency required to select the path will be drastically deteriorated by increasing the number of traffic modes and terminals. With different goals, the minimization of cost, time, risk and unreliability, it is usually assumed that the route selection of multimodal transportation is a multicriteria decision making (MCDM) problem. On the basis of the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and artificial neural network (ANN) theory, we set up a hybrid MCDM model. The proposed method makes the route selection system in multimodal transportation more comprehensive, scientific, fair and accurate. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.