Sensitivity analysis Decision techniques and weighting techniques in multiple attribute decision making Case Study (priority public transport systems in Qom)

Prelims

Sustainable development is a holistic practice and the concept of sustainability considers social, economic, and environmental issues simultaneously. Sustainable transportation system is the need of the hour because of significant challenges for cities with respect to traffic congestion, environment pollution, etc., leading to overall global warming. However, there are no proper guidelines in place for Indian cities currently to be considered by the urban development authorities to implement or evaluate different types of sustainable transportation systems. Considering these, the present study developed a design methodology to enhance the level of existing transport systems in terms of its sustainability for the modes, namely, public transport (PT) and non-motorized transport (NMT) system. Further, the evaluation methodology was also developed by proposing ‘sustainability indices’ which will help policymakers or development authorities in assessing the status as well as changes that occurred due to policy interventions in PT and NMT systems.KeywordsSustainabilityPublic transportNon-motorized transportSustainability index

Education is an essential component for nations preparing to take advantage of the opportunities and confront the challenges of the 21st century. Universities, colleges, and research centers must work effectively and efficiently to achieve maximum results. In order to provide a comparable and verifiable evaluation of such institutions’ efforts, administrators need to adopt measurement tools such as those offered by multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM). The use of MCDM to solve complex real-world problems in the educational sector has dramatically increased in the past decade. This paper ranked the Engineering departments in a public university from 2019 to 2021 using combined MCDM methods between Analytical Hierarchy Analysis (AHP) and Ranking Alternatives by Perimeter Similarity (RAPS). The AHP technique assisted in the weighting for each evaluation criterion covered in this study. The RAPS technique assisted in ranking the Engineering departments using weights derived from the AHP technique. For the first time, the use of RAPS in the educational sector is presented in this paper. The findings revealed some of the departments under investigation’s vulnerabilities, indicating that they require assistance from the institution’s administration. Moreover, the results demonstrate that combining the AHP and RAPS techniques to evaluate and rank university departments is a successful method.

User Perception of Paratransit System Characteristics in the Context of Public Transport System

This paper provides a Lagrangian dynamic fluid model of the traffic of Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) system or of personal rapid maglev-transporters. The transport system using these maglev-transporters or sky-podcars operates in the style of demand-responsive systems. The advantage of the sky-podcars is that they are fast and that they do not operate in the same physical space as the other ground transportation modes. Thus they will contribute to alleviate congestion. We model the dynamics of the sky-podcars transportation system and we solve the problem of relocation with minimum cost in this maglev system. An analysis of assumptions of effective operation of the PRT is carried out. Reactive dynamic assignment in such PRT system is described. In a multi-modal transport system where the maglev-transporters mode is taken into account, we describe the multi-modal dynamic assignment and its spatial interactions with other common transportation systems.

In the last decade the Netherlands has experienced an economic recession. Now, in 2017, the economy is picking up again. This growth does not only come with advantages because economic growth demands more from the transport system. Congestion is increasing again, the capacity of the train system is now insufficient during peak hours, and the world faces environmental challenges that are partly due to emissions caused by travellers. These negative effects worsen as travellers make rational choices, which could be undesirable from a system, or social welfare, perspective. For example, car drivers do often not choose public transport options, because it costs them more effort; however, if they choose public transport options, then the system improves since congestion and emissions will reduce. Or another example, if travellers choose to avoid peak hours, they might not arrive at their desired time, but then they do not contribute to peak hour congestion or crowding. In addition, the capacity of the transport system is more effectively used if travellers spread out over the day. Passenger transport pricing can be an incentive for travellers to change their choices, and can therefore be used to mitigate congestion, emissions, and other undesirable effects. Passenger transport pricing is the umbrella term for measures that make passengers pay for their travels. Traditional pricing measures are for example: fuel excise taxes, public transport fares, and periodical registration fees for vehicles. More innovative measures are cordon charges (e.g., in London, Stockholm, and Singapore), special tolling lanes, and peak avoidance projects. When such an innovative measure has different prices for times of the day, and for different locations (i.e., it is time- and space-differentiated), travellers’ choices related to route, mode and departure time can be influenced. By changing these choices, the overall performance of the transport system can improve. Travellers have differences regarding time valuation, preferred departure or arrival times, and car ownership. Therefore, a measure can become even more effective if it also allows to differentiate amongst characteristics of travellers. However, innovative pricing measures have not been implemented widely across the globe, despite their potential to reduce congestion and emissions. This is primarily due to lack of public and political support. The Netherlands has experienced decades of political discourse and many failed proposals. Low public support did not contribute to (political) agreement either, because it has always fuelled the discussion with dissenting opinions. In the process of designing policies and making decisions, strategic planning models usually estimate (or forecast) the effects of the policy. The preferences of travellers and the transport system are captured by mathematical equations. Such models are always a simplified representation of reality. To apply them to asses pricing measures, they should capture the underlying mechanisms that are important for transport pricing as realistic as possible. This dissertation identifies disadvantages of current strategic network models for passenger transport pricing and provides methodological advances to resolve them. This is done with a holistic approach that combines game theory, discrete choice analysis, traffic flow theory, and tranport economics into one modelling framework. This framework has many sub-models and provides a toolbox for analysts to determine the effects of innovative pricing schemes. The basic principle for each tool is to make them realistic (so that the results are credible for decision makers), and computationally efficient. The latter means that many different pricing schemes can be computed within reasonable time. By providing the methodological advances, that are briefly discussed in the next sections, this dissertation aims to improve public and political support. For example, the preferences of multiple stakeholders can be considered, the possible conflicts between them can be identified, and solutions based on concepts that aim to resolve these conflicts can be computed.

Choosing safe and suitable bicycle routes to integrate cycling and public transport systems

The public transport system is one of the key factors determining the economic and social development of modern cities, faced with the goal of providing convenient connections between different areas of the functional structure, i.e. ensuring high comfort and short travel time, while minimizing environmental impact. However, it is worth asking: is creating such a transport system possible, does it exclude certain social groups, and is it capable of satisfying the needs of all users? More and more modern planners and transportation engineers are facing this dilemma. According to many scientific publications, universal design is the answer, hence shaping public spaces and the transport systems with awareness of the diversity of the human collectivity in terms of sex, age, physical ability and health condition. Elderly people above 60 years of age and the disabled, who have various types of mental, physical and sensory dysfunctions, are at the greatest risk of social exclusion. These groups of people encounter many architectural and transportation barriers in their daily lives that make it impossible for them to move freely, thus limiting their access to education, employment and culture. Only through analysis of the existing transport system, identification of transportation barriers, and the appropriate decisions to eliminate them can this exclusion be counteracted and a city without barriers be created – a free city where every resident can move easily, whether they are blind, hard of hearing or a wheelchair user. This article defines the concepts of elderly and disabled people and presents the barriers most frequently encountered in city transport systems. Moreover, guidelines for designing a transport system according to the needs of the analyzed group are proposed. The results of survey studies conducted in Oswiecim and Cracow concerning assessment of public transport and its adaptation to elderly and disabled people are a significant part of this article. Results and conclusions obtained from studies can be an inspiration for other cities that want to create a transport system adapted to the needs of the analysed group, however it is also worth remembering that shaping public spaces and transport “for everyone” is only possible by engaging all parties interested in the problem, i.e. above all, elderly and disabled people as well as city authorities, and then making every effort to reach a consensus between these groups.

Smart cards for public transportation have become a significant source of information for analyzing mobility trends and assisting public authorities and transportation organizations in making decisions. This article describes a visualization tool developed by LINKS Foundation that exhibits spatial and temporal characteristics, with the goal of demonstrating the potential of analysing and visualising smart card validation and transit data towards better decision making. The Piedmont region’s transit data was used as a case study. The developed public transport visualization tool (called Mobisuite) represents the transit system supply, the mobility demand, and the ticketing system through three primary visualization modules. The tool employs a virtual check out algorithm, which estimates the users’ travel diary and aids in the calculation of various transit indicators, e.g. passenger kilometers, maximum load, number of on-boarding passengers, average load. Mobisuite can be a helpful tool for displaying the public transport system for the whole transport network at a glance, and it can be used to simplify communication between transit operators and public agencies regarding the public transport planning, operation and fares.KeywordsSmart-card ticketDecision support systemsFare collectionE-ticketing dataTransit planningPublic transportationTransportation demandIntelligent transportation systems

Urban transport plays an important role in low-carbon eco-city and energy conservation and emission reduction in the transport sector. Urban low-carbon transport system is a complex dynamic system including society, economy, motor vehicles, cars, transport infrastructure and other factors. This paper analyzes the complex dynamics relationship through building an urban low-carbon transport system. Taking Shanghai as a case to simulate the urban low-carbon system, and the result suggests rapid increase of private cars is an important driver factor of carbon emissions. So, it is important to strengthen urban transport demand management and improve the urban transport structure in building urban low-carbon transport.

El objetivo de la investigación fue analizar el sistema de transporte urbano de la ciudad de Puno, se propone de infraestructura vial urbano para tener una capacidad vial de acuerdo al tipo de vía y así poder optimizar el tiempo de viaje del pasajero según la tendencia de movilidad, movilidad de origen destino según zonas, movilidad del transporte urbano. Se analizó el recorrido de rutas de transporte público urbano para determinar la velocidad promedio y así poder conocer los tiempos de viajes. La hipótesis que se ha formulado es: con el análisis del sistema de transporte urbano se propone infraestructura vial urbana para optimizar el tiempo de viaje del pasajero de la ciudad de Puno-2018, se analiza la tendencia de movilidad según origen destino, la movilidad del transporte urbano, rutas de transporte urbano público e infraestructura vial urbana. La investigación centró su metodología, bajo un enfoque cuantitativo, diseño no experimental. Se aplicó un cuestionario como un instrumento para el análisis; de los cuales permitieron recoger información y analizar las variables de estudio y efectuar las correlaciones. La muestra estuvo conformada de 384 pasajeros y 8 microbuses que brindan servicio en las principales rutas de transporte público urbano. Como resultado se tiene que el sistema de transporte urbano de la ciudad de Puno es concentrado debido al uso de suelo en la zona céntrica, la movilidad vehicular tiene obstáculos en el flujo debido al uso de la calzada como estacionamiento y que las vías superan su capacidad vial la cual no optimiza los tiempos de viajes en ciudad de Puno para lo cual se requiere de infraestructura vial urbana como son: terminales terrestres, pavimentado de las vías paraderos, declarar zonas rígidas las vías que son utilizadas por las rutas de transporte urbano e implementar un sistema inteligente de gestión de tráfico en las intersecciones principales de la ciudad.

Urban public transport plays a critical role in stimulating economic development of any nation since most of the revenues come from cities. The majority of the city dwellers of any country use public transport. The evaluation of public transport service quality provides a valuable feedback to commuter operators to ensure continuous improvement of level of service and to the government to take appropriate measures for enhancing the quality of public transport service. This paper analyses and evaluates service quality of Road Public Transport (RPT) (i.e. minibuses and buses) and Urban Rail Transport (URT) in Dar es Salaam City, Tanzania. Since service quality and its attributes are intangible and vague, a fuzzy evaluation model is developed and applied. The formulated model is composed of Fuzzy Entropy Method (FEM) and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). The overall evaluation procedure is as follows: initially, an intensive literature search and experts’ opinions are employed to establish criteria for evaluating the service quality of public transport in Dar es Salaam City. The developed FEM is used to obtain criteria weight. Lastly, the formulated TOPSIS is used to provide an overall ranking of urban public transport service quality. The overall evaluation shows that urban rail transport outperforms road public transport in terms of service quality. Nevertheless, the urban rail transport service in Dar es Salaam City is currently not well developed as it is provided on very limited routes. Thus, the Tanzania government, the rail transport operator i.e. Tanzania Railway Limited (TRL) and the agency responsible for the provision of rail infrastructure i.e. Reli Assets Holding Company (RAHCO) are advised to design and employ Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) schemes i.e. concession contracts to invest more in rolling stocks, locomotives and rail wagons so that the rail transport service is available on many routes of the road public transport to bring fair competition between the two operators.

Rapid urbanization, increasing population, and a booming economy have stimulated growth in Indian cites, resulting in higher levels of dependence on private vehicles. This has raised serious issues over the sustainability of transport infrastructure in cities. Public transportation (PT) systems can help achieve sustainable transportation. But they face competition from intermediate public transport (IPT) or Paratransit. The existing PT and IPT systems, therefore, need to re-plan their operations to complement each other and deliver a wider network of services. To achieve this, an evaluation of both PT and IPT systems at microscopic levels is needed to facilitate their possible integration in a coordinated multimodal transportation system. The present paper attempts to evaluate the public and paratransit systems in the city of Surat in the Indian state of Gujarat using a data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique in DEAP software at the individual and system level. The operations, route design, and cost efficiency of both systems are evaluated to understand how well the existing set-up caters to demand. The arithmetic mean of operations, route design, and cost efficiencies of 26 routes of PT system were worked out to be 0.89, 0.94, and 0.69, while that of the 13 routes of the IPT system were 0.92, 0.97, and 0.88 respectively. The system investigation shows that analytically, only 8% of IPT routes were inefficient in all the three aspects, compared with 42% of PT routes. The performance of each route was analyzed, appropriate suggestions made, and the potential of these systems for designing an integrated transport system highlighted.

Public transportation plays a key role to socio-economic development of any nation. This service enhances people’s livelihood framework by facilitating mobility and accessibility to services. Moreover, there is clear global evidence that a well performing public transport is an important enabler of sustained economic prosperity. Rapid urbanization in developing countries has resulted in transport facilities and infrastructure failing to cope with demand resulting in congestion, movement delays, high travel costs, and construction of holding bays in order to decongest the city, which will contribute to an increased usage of non-renewable energy. This prompts implementation of non-comprehensive strategies such as partial deregulation of transportation systems that caused further deterioration in economic sustainability. An economically sustainable transport system advocates for mobility, resource, and operational efficiency. This research focuses on developing a bus investment conceptual framework of a public transport system that improves mobility, resource, and operational efficiency to aid in sustaining of public transportation system for an unforeseeable future. With this in mind, a Harare bus investment system has been modelled as a policy framework model to evaluate its economic sustainability. This will help develop a long-term economically sustainable public transportation and reduce the overall impact of the earlier liberalisation of the transportation sector

Системи міського пасажирського транспорту займають особливе місце в загальній структурі пасажирського транспорту, що пояснюється безупинним підвищенням ролі міст у житті суспільства, обумовленого розподілом праці та концентрацією виробництва. Зміни в житті України призвели до значної модифікації структури потреб населення в перевезеннях і перебудові маршрутних систем більшості українських міст, яка найчастіше носила стихійний характер. У той же час прийняття рішень про зміну маршрутних систем являє собою складну задачу, що торкається інтересів великої кількості городян та має значне соціальне й економічне значення. Створення інформаційної бази міста передбачає збір вихідних даних про транспортну мережу, характеристики вулично-дорожньої мережі і попиту на переміщення пасажирів. При цьому вибір маршрутів руху громадського транспорту, що входять у систему, відбувається на основі попередньої оцінки ефективності її функціонування. На підставі пасажиропотоків за кожним маршрутом розраховується раціональна кількість транспортних засобів, техніко-економічні і техніко-експлуатаційні показники роботи на маршрутах. У роботі представлено аналіз оціночних показників функціонування пасажирської системи міста Дубно, дано їх характеристику, намічено шляхи покращення ефективності функціонування на перспективу.