MULTICRITERIA METHOD FOR TRANSPORTATION INVESTMENT PLANNING.

Transportation investment planning may be described as a multicriteria decision problem because planning projects typically have two or more conflicting objectives. The transportation planning process entails the evaluation of a discrete set of alternatives with respect to these conflicting objectives. This paper argues that, since under these circumstances optimal solutions do not exist, the outcome of the evaluation process should be the identification of a small set of alternatives, termed best compromise alternatives, which come closest to achieving the stated objectives. Concordance analysis is utilized to identify the best compromise alternatives. An empirical application of the method is conducted utilizing data from an Orange County, California, transportation corridor study. Empirical results show that the method identified a small set of significantly different best compromise transport investment alternatives. A sensitivity analysis of the results is also presented.