Sustainable Public Transportation System Evaluation: A Novel Two-Stage Hybrid Method Based on IVIF-AHP and CODAS

Abstract

As a multi-disciplinary process, planning of public transportation systems needs special attention from several groups of stakeholders such as passengers, transportation planners, system providers, and so on. Since each stakeholder has dissimilar viewpoints on the evaluation of the public transportation systems, they have contradictory goal and objectives. In this sense, multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) provides an important procedural outline for the evaluation of public transportation alternatives. This paper presents an application of MCDM method to assess the public transportation alternatives designed for a public university in a large-sized metropolitan area. Two alternatives of MCDM methods, named Interval-Valued Intuitionistic Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process & COmbinative Distance-based Assessment (IVIF-AHP & CODAS), are integrated in the evaluation process. The proposed method ensures consistent and reasonable results and provides suggestions for the forthcoming progresses of public transportation service quality. In order to validate robustness of the proposed method, sensitivity analyses are implemented. Also, at the end of the study, to prove the superiority of the proposed approach, a comparative analysis is employed.