Investigating ideal-solution based multicriteria decision making techniques for sustainability evaluation of urban mobility projects

Abstract

Confronted with negative environmental impacts, rising fuel costs and increasing congestion, many cities are implementing sustainable mobility measures to improve the flow of passenger and goods. Examples of these measures are use of public transport, cycling, walking, energy efficient vehicles, biofuels. The challenge before transport decision makers is which one(s) to choose for implementation as often there is no or limited quantitative data available on the subject. Moreover, the context of each city, its geographic and transport conditions restrict the generalization of results obtained in experienced cities. In this paper, we are investigating application of ideal solution based multicriteria decision making (MCDM) techniques namely fuzzy TOPSIS, fuzzy VIKOR, and fuzzy GRA for sustainability evaluation of urban mobility projects. A real application for city of Luxembourg is provided. Three projects are evaluated namely implementation of a new tramway in the city center of Luxembourg, re-organization of existing bus lines in the city to perform optimized service, and implementation of electric vehicle car-sharing stations in the city. Sensitivity analysis is performed to determine the influence of input parameters on modeling results. The proposed work is one of the first few works to investigate application of ideal-solution based multicriteria decision making techniques for sustainability evaluation of urban mobility projects under uncertainty. Besides, the best alternative is selected using veto thereby overcoming the limitations of single MCDM methods.