Multi-criteria decision-making in the transport sector

Abstract

The transportation sector appears to be among the most highly competitive, in a continuous search for effectiveness and efficiency. In the logic of decision-making processes, to meet the competitive needs of the sector, optimization, or the selection of the best element, with respect to some criterion, from a set of available alternatives, appears central. Business choices seek to achieve the optimum, i.e., the best or most favourable condition, or the maximum amount or degree possible under a specific set of comparable circumstances. In addition to traditional decision making, there is the technique of linear programming, which is an optimization problem in which the objective function is a linear function subject to linear constraints, which may be equalities and/or inequalities. Linear programming problems have a strong practical interest because many real-life problems can be modelled in terms of linear programming, since the approach to the decisions made is approximately linear. For this type of problem, algorithms are also capable of solving problems with a large number of variables and constraints, even on low-power computers. Therefore, linear programming can be a useful tool to support management in decision-making activities, helping both to reduce human effort and to provide quantitative results to optimization problems such as revenue maximization or cost minimization. The chapter would like to analyze the decision-making process in transportation organizations seeking competitive advantage, illustrating through even some case studies how some choices turned out to be better than others.