Design of passenger public transportation solutions based on autonomous vehicles and their multiple criteria comparison with traditional forms of passenger transportation

In this paper, the authors present their concept of public transportation on demand based on autonomous vehicles. They develop several passengers' transportation solutions based on driverless vehicles and compare them with traditional forms of passenger transportation (tram, bus, taxi and individual car). The authors carry out a multiple criteria evaluation of all eight considered variants. They formulate the decision problem as a multiple criteria ranking problem. Thus, a consistent family of evaluation criteria is constructed. It includes the following measures: travel time, travel costs, comfort of travel, reliability, timeliness, availability, environmental friendliness, safety. Based on the analysis of stakeholders' interests the model of preferences is defined. It is composed of two major elements: importance of criteria and sensitivity of the decision maker (DM) towards changes of the criteria values. A series of computational experiments is performed. In the computational phase a multiple criteria ranking method - Electre III/IV is applied to generate the final ranking of all considered variants - transportation solutions. The position of variants based on autonomous vehicles is thoroughly discussed. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V.