The traffic system is as essential to modern society as the circulatory system to the human body. Road section design is therefore a key infrastructure activity for economic development, and multi-criteria decision-making can provide an interdisciplinary approach that moves beyond purely economic optimisation to include technological, technical and ecological factors. The present work describes applying the multi-criteria Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method to evaluate road section design in an urban environment through differential weighting of various criteria and sub-criteria. The model is tested on a stretch of National Road D8 in the municipality of Podstrana near the city of Split (Croatia), which serves as an important route for commuters and tourists. The proposed AHP model provided reliable results that were robust to sensitivity analysis. This approach involving differential criterion weighting may prove useful for evaluating and selecting appropriate road section designs for this and other contexts.
<p>This paper presents the analysis of the implementation of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in solving problems in the area of transport. The transport sector is currently one of the most important sectors, and an efficient transport system requires continuous planning. Investments in transport infrastructure are projects that have specific characteristics. These projects have an extremely long lifetime (some thirty years), are not profit-oriented, are usually financed by the state of the local administration, and are primarily for social use. The decision-making process, which includes making decisions on investments, is extremely complex. The decision-maker has to envisage the future, and consequently make decisions in a modern and flexible manner. The methods used in the process of evaluating the investment projects in transport are numerous and usually distinguished by the optimization criteria. The projects can be evaluated through the prism of a single criterion or several criteria. The most common optimization criterion is the economic system; however, long-term and high-quality solutions require the introduction of other optimization criteria such as technological, technical, ecological and many others. Therefore, in such situations it is essential to implement multi-criteria decision methods which will eventually result in making the optimal decision. It will be determined in the paper to what extent the AHP method is implemented regarding transport problems and for which categories of transport problems.</p>
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