Distributed decision evaluation model in public transportation systems

Due to several external and internal disturbances affecting public transportation systems, some regulation measures have to be undertaken. In the regulation process, the regulator has to evaluate a number of possible decisions in order to determine best compromise of some regulation criteria. The complexity of this task increases when numerous disturbances appear simultaneously and mainly when regulation criteria are contradictory. For these reasons, we propose in this paper a multi-agent model that deals with decision evaluation step as a multicriteria optimization problem. In this model, the best compromise is determined by means of the following concepts: Pareto optimality, a-efficiency and plurality voting. The process of the proposed approach is shown through an illustrative example. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.