Evaluating Passenger Demand for Development of the Urban Transport System by an AHP Model with the Real-World Application of Amman

Abstract

The demand for a service includes generally two major components; quality elements and the reasonable and affordable price. Public transport can be considered as a special service, there is no direct market competition for the provider, but the use of private transport modes substitutes the usage of public vehicles. The dominating competitor, the usage of private cars, causes higher CO2 emission and has a serious impact on the environment. Thus, it is important to analyze from market and sustainability point of view which are the preferences of the public for the improvement of the urban transport system. This paper aims to conduct this analysis by including quality criteria and transport fare criteria related to the current service of a city and by setting up and testing a generally applicable model for decision support. Since the acquisition of public preference was the primary objective, and the problem can be considered as decision making, the Analytic Hierarchy Process was selected as methodology. There are previous research results of applying this method on public transport, however, not in an integrated model, in which quality and cost considerations are pairwise compared. Thus, the conventional Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique was used and the well-proven requisites of consistency and sensitivity check were analyzed. The new model was tested in a case study: surveying the public transport demand in the capital of Jordan, Amman.

An Integrated Decision Support Model for Evaluating Public Transport Quality

“…For evaluation, the supply quality factors were designed in a three-level hierarchical structure with each factor symbolized with the code C, as shown in Figure 1. These supply quality factors have a significant influence on the public transportation system, as discussed in the foregoing studies [19,21].…”

“…This model led to better approximation for evaluators-judgments that reflected the real intention of the decision maker. Reference [21] detected passengers' demand toward developing public transport supply quality in Amman, Jordan, by conducting the conventional AHP and extended the hierarchy structure of public bus transport supply quality of [14] by injecting the fare as a main criterion in the system; the outcomes showed the fare as the third most important criteria from passengers' point of view. To deal with the inconsistencies and uncertainties of citizens' answers in evaluating the urban transport quality, [22] adopted the interval AHP approach and compared users' perspectives with nonusers' and experts' point of view.…”

A Model for Business Performance Improvement: A Case of the Postal Company

“…Wang et al (2016) applied a fuzzy AHP for forming approaches to support the selection of transport mode for military logistics, and similar approach was used for a decision-making tool in third-party logistics (3PL) provider selection (Bulgurcu & Nakiboglu, 2018;Singh et al, 2018;Jovčić et al, 2019). Alkharabsheh et al (2019) analysed passenger demand for the development of the urban transport system by an AHP model. Cyril et al (2019) have developed a method based on AHP, could be used for performance evaluation and optimization of different public transport systems.…”

Demand Prediction Using a Soft-Computing Approach: A Case Study of Automotive Industry

“…The combination of perspectives helps enrich any task, address more environments and generate better approaches. For instance, [19] introduce a new approach of forecasting using a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) model which integrates quality and cost type attributes.…”