MCDM approaches for evaluating urban and public transportation systems: a short review of recent studies

Abstract

Studies related to transportation planning and development have been in the center of activities of many researchers in the past decades. Road congestions issues, economic problems, health problems and environmental problems are some examples of complex problems that can be caused by urban and public transportation in big cities. Evaluating urban and public transportation systems could help to reach effective solutions to overcome these issues. This article presents a short bibliographic review of some recent studies on Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) approaches for evaluating urban and public transportation systems. To this aim, Scopus was chosen as the database for making a search on journal articles. Scopus is trusted by major institutions in the world, and all journals covered in this database are inspected for sufficiently high quality each year. The search was made on the journal articles from 2017 to 2022 (July). The analyses presented in this study show that the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method is the most used method, which has been applied to different studies in the field of urban and public transportation systems based on MCDM approaches. According to the analysis of the number of articles, Turkey is ranked 1st among different countries, and “Budapest University of Technology and Economics” (Hungary) is 1st in the ranking of institutions. Moreover, most of the articles have been published within the “social sciences” subject area. The recent trend in different studies on urban and public transportation systems shows the importance of using MCDM approaches in this field. Moreover, noticeable employment of fuzzy sets in several studies is a point that can shows the significant role of uncertainty in dealing with this type of problems.