Incorporating uncertain and incomplete subjective judgments into the evaluation procedure of transportation demand management alternatives

This paper proposes a methodology for evaluating transportation demand management (TDM) alternatives in the context of multi-criteria decision making (MCDM). The proposed approach takes into account not only quantitative criteria (i.e. transportation and environmental impacts) but also qualitative criteria (i.e. social impacts) which are intrinsically uncertain and subjective. The transportation impacts of the TDM alternatives are estimated by TRIPS 1 program, while the MOBILE5a(2) is employed in order to estimate environmental impacts in terms of NOX, CO and Hydrocarbon. The social impacts of the TDM alternatives are estimated by interviewing relevant experts. Consequently, the uncertain subjective judgements were quantified by the evidential reasoning (ER) approach based on decision theory and Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence. In order to measure the weights of criteria, analytical hierarchy process (AHP) is adopted. As a last step, the CODASID(3) method based on a complete concordance and discordance analysis is used to rank alternative TDM schemes. The proposed approach is demonstrated by ranking 14 TDM alternatives, which are chosen for the central business area in Bangkok, Thailand of 22-square-kilometers.