A MULTI-CRITERIA ASSESSMENT APPROACH FOR THE EVALUATION OF RAILWAY TRANSPORT IN THE BALKAN REGION

The Balkan region has an important geostrategic position in passenger and freight transport between Europe and Asia. This paper studies the development of railway transport on twelve different railway transport markets in the Balkan region. The methodology is based on multi-criteria assessment of the level of railway development. The approach presented in this paper could help railway companies to make decisions about railway transport services. The methodology includes three steps. In the first step, the quantitative and qualitative criteria for the evaluation of the social, economic, infrastructural and technological impact of the level of development of railway transport have been defined. In the second step, the weights of criteria have been determined using both objective and subjective approaches by applying the Shannon Entropy method and the Stepwise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis (SWARA) method. The third step presents the ranking of the countries by applying three multi-criteria methods - Vise Kriterijumska Optimizacija i kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR), Weighted Aggregated Sum Product Assessment (WASPAS) and Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluation (PROMETHEE), which are different in their approaches. The results show that the criteria: maximum train technical speed (13%), ERTMS Level (10%), number of train kilometres per year (9%) and Ro-La intermodal service (9%) have a great importance in the ranking. It was found that the most developed railway transports in the Balkan region are Turkey, Croatia, Slovenia, and Romania.