Abstract

In any public service development decision, it is essential to reach the stakeholders&rsquo agreement to gain a sustainable result, which is accepted by all involved groups. In case this criterion is violated, the impact of the development will be less than expected due to the resistance of one group or another. Concerning public urban transport decisions, the lack of consensus might cause lower utilisation of public vehicles, thus more severe environmental damage, traffic problems and negative economic impacts. This paper aims to introduce a decision support procedure (applying the current MCDM techniques Fuzzy and Interval AHP) which is capable of analysing and creating consensus among different stakeholder participants in a transport development problem. The combined application of FAHP and IAHP ensures that the consensus creation is not only based on an automated computation process (just as in IAHP) but also on the consideration of specific group interests. Thus, the decision makers have the liberty to express their preferences in urban planning, along with the consideration of numerical results. The procedure has been tested in a real public transport improvement decision as a follow-up project, in an emerging city, Mersin, Turkey. Results show that by the application of the proposed techniques, decision-makers can be more aware of the conflicts of interests among the involved groups, and they can pay more attention to possible violations. Document type: Article

Abstract

This paper describes a methodology for the application of Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) on the technology selection for emissions reduction from shipping under uncertainties and incomplete information. Nine criteria in four aspects, including technological (maturity), economic (capital cost and operation cost), environmental (effects of SO "sub"x"/sub", NO "sub"x"/sub", GHG, and PM reduction), and social-political aspects (government support and social acceptability), were used for the sustainability assessment. The study aims at developing the methodology for technology selection for emissions reduction from shipping by combining Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and VIKOR. Fuzzy AHP was used to determine the weights of the evaluation criteria and the relative performance of the alternatives with respect to each evaluation criterion, and VIKOR was used to prioritize the alternative technologies. The two methods of VIKOR and the traditional AHP were combined to validate the proposed methodology. Three alternative technologies of low sulphur fuel, scrubber and LNG were studied using the proposed model, and the results indicate that the proposed methodology is capable of assisting the decision-makers to select the most sustainable technology for emissions reduction from shipping under uncertainties and incomplete information.