Authors: Jie Yu, Yue, Liu, and Gang-Len Chang
Journal: ASCE Journal of Infrastructure Systems
Abstract:
This paper presents a robust multi-criteria model for prioritizing highway safety improvement projects, in which a set of criteria related to the project’s technical, economic, social and environmental impacts are properly weighted in consideration. The proposed model features an analytical hierarchy process (AHP) framework to tackle the multi-criteria decision making problem. Different from the conventional AHP, this paper adds a fuzzy scale level between the criteria level and the alternative level which offers the advantage of preventing the vagueness and uncertainty on judgments of the decision-maker(s). Such a unique modeling feature is further embedded with a nonlinear optimization formulation to maximize the consistency in pair-wise comparison and weight estimation for each criterion. Case study results reveal that the proposed model is efficient not only for selecting the most suitable project for a specific site, but also for determining the priorities for implementation those suitable projects among multiple sites given the budget constraint. Comparative study between the proposed model and the existing ranking methods has also indicated its capability to capture the comprehensive impacts of all contributory factors which have been neglected by most existing approaches during the safety project selection process. The clarity of model inputs, ease of synthesizing the final score of each candidate project, and the interpretation of results with respect to different selection criteria offer its best potential to be used as an effective tool for highway infrastructure manager and transportation authorities to assess and refine the highway safety improvement investments.
