A hybrid model of fuzzy and AHP for handling public assessments on transportation projects

Having an effective public participation in transportation planning and project development processes has been a major concern for developed countries. In the United States, for instance, all state Departments of Transportation are subject to the Transportation Equity Act (TEA-21) that formally requires public involvement in transportation planning. Since transportation planning involves public resources and values, judgments by the public should play a key role in determining final decisions. Therefore, all these agencies are required not only to disseminate information to the public, but also to solicit and consider public opinion in forming transportation policy. This work presents a decision support model, with public involvement and public oversight, to help policy makers select appropriate transportation projects for implementation. Since focus groups will face multiple objectives and inexact information in the process, a hybrid model of fuzzy logic and analytical hierarchy process (AHP) is proposed. A set of ‘if–then’ rules based on Weber’s psycho-physical law of 1834 is presented to reason from fuzzy numbers to capture essential subjective preferences, pairwise, among the alternatives. The AHP is then incorporated to estimate preference allotments among alternatives. An example application of the suggested method is provided seeking public approval of an appropriate public bus transportation system choosing between one run by municipal authorities and one run by private agencies to show how this procedure works.

A bus route evaluation model based on GIS and super-efficient data envelopment analysis

When compared to large cities in developed countries, the shares of public transportation in most Chinese cities are low. Increasing the competitiveness of urban public transportation remains an urgent problem. A capable evaluation method for public transportation is required to assist the development of urban transit systems. This paper focuses on the bus system. Being devoid of standard criteria, it is difficult to determine the efficiency of a transit system or any bus line using a single evaluation index. This paper proposes a comparative analysis to evaluate bus lines so as to filter out candidates for further optimization. From the viewpoints of transit planning, operation and quality of service, this paper establishes 10 subordinate evaluation indices and then uses geographical information system tools, global positioning system data and smart card data to assist the index definition and calculation. Super-efficient data envelopment analysis (DEA) method is adopted for the proposed single factor and comprehensive evaluation models. Finally, the bus system in Shenzhen, China is used as a case study. The comparable significant results validate the capability of the proposed model.