Journal of Emerging Trends in Engineering and Applied Sciences: Research Areas

Abstract:
Conventional transportation planning is an exercise in data manipulation. The process requires large amounts of good quantitative data and analytic capabilities. Meanwhile urban transport has economic, environmental and social dimensions that cannot be easily quantified. This paper discusses a multi-criteria decision-making framework that is being developed to make transportation planning more sustainable by incorporating economic and non-quantifiable environmental and social dimensions into the decision-making process. Data for the study was collected from Accra, Ghana, and the framework integrates inputs from both system users and providers, to reflect how candidate projects meet a set of local sustainability measures. The result from the integration is a set of numbers termed Localized Sustainability Score (LSS). These scores are modeled using the Analytic Hierarchy Process to produce a relative ranking of the projects, and this can serve as a decision support for project screening and prioritization. The case study results showed that the framework adequately represented local needs and priorities. The LSS determined for some selected projects maintained the original relative rankings that were already derived using conventional methods, but with less resources.

Keywords: sustainable transportation, participatory approach, stakeholder involvement, multi-criteria decision-making, localized sustainability score

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