Assessing sustainability of transport system through index: A state-of-the-art review

Abstract

Abstract The transport is one of the most important sectors that affect the economic development. However, its sustainability may be disturbed due to the remarkable increase in the number of vehicles in city centers and its bad consequences, hence the importance of assessing the transport system and the performance of its different components. Therefore, several evaluation methods were introduced to help decision-makers assess sustainability and many indicators were developed to track the progress of sustainable transport system. This work provides a literature review about the existing approaches used to assess transport sustainability through composite indicators. It aims at analyzing the trends in the existing literature, identifying gaps in evaluating sustainability and suggesting future research perspectives. A total of 47 studies conducted in the period 2002–2022 are examined. The obtained results show that few researchers focused on freight transportand most researchers considered only traditional sustainability dimensions. In addition, the performed analysis demonstrates that the use of different methods of normalization, weighting and aggregation influences the result given by composite indicator. Finally, a set of recommendations for precise and correct sustainability assessment is presented in order to develop future research.