A Novel Parsimonious Best Worst Method for Evaluating Travel Mode Choice

There is an obvious trade-off between the amount of information obtained from user surveys and low-cost and time-efficient survey. In this study, we propose a Parsimonious Best Worst Method (P-BWM) to unburden the evaluators from the extensive number of pairwise comparisons required originated by numerous factors and alternatives required by the Best Worst Method (BWM) in the complex decision problems. The new Parsimonious BWM model assigns priorities to many elements by contrasting pair wisely some reference elements, also it combines the straightforwardness of direct evaluations with the dependability and stability of the BWM approach. The developed Parsimonious BWM technique has been experimented and validated in a real-world problem of Mersin city in Turkey, to evaluate travel mode alternatives. Moreover, a comparative analysis has been applied to the correlation of the adopted outcomes between BWM and P-BWM.