An Integrated Decision Support Model for Evaluating Public Transport Quality

Abstract

Big cities suffer from serious complex problems such as air pollution, congestion, and traffic accidents. Developing public transport quality in such cities is considered an efficient remedy to obviate these critical issues. This paper aims to determine the significant supply quality criteria of public transportation. As a methodology, a hybrid Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) combined with the Best Worst Method (BWM) is applied. The proposed model is basically a hierarchy structure with at least a 5 × 5 pairwise comparison matrix or larger. A real-world complex problem was examined to validate the created model (public transport quality improvement). An urban bus transport system in the Jordanian capital city, Amman, was used as a case study; three stakeholder groups (passengers, nonpassengers, and representatives of the local government) participated in the evaluation process. The conventional Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) leads to weak consistency in the case of existing 5 × 5 pairwise comparison matrices or larger, particularly in estimating complex problems. To avoid this critical issue in AHP, we used Best Worst Method (BWM) comparisons, which make the evaluation process easier for decision makers; moreover, it saves survey time and provides more consistency when compared to AHP pairwise comparisons. The model adopted highlighted the most significant service quality criteria that influence urban bus transport systems. Furthermore, the sensitivity analysis conducted detected the stability of the criteria ranking in the three levels of the hierarchical structure. Since the proposed AHP–BWM model (which is the sole example of this sort of combination) is independent from the decision attributes, it can be applied to arbitrary hierarchically structured decision problems with a relatively large number of pairwise comparisons.