Towards Sustainable Transport Assessment Considering Alternative Fuels Based on MCDA Methods

Abstract

Sustainable transport can contribute to many beneficial changes, such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions and pollutants into the atmosphere, improving the country's energy security, and enhancing energy efficiency. Therefore, it is essential to provide a framework for reliable measurement of sustainable transport, enabling its evaluation in terms of diversity and the significance of renewable energy sources (RES). This paper presents a methodological framework for a multi-criteria assessment of sustainable transportation. The proposed framework is based on three multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) methods: SPOTIS (Stable Preference Ordering Towards Ideal Solution), ARAS (Additive Ratio Assessment), and TOPSIS (Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution). The application of the proposed tool is demonstrated in an illustrative example of the assessment of European countries in terms of the share of alternative fuels in final energy consumption in road transport. The authors used the proposed framework to perform a comparative analysis considering three MCDA methods and two methods for determining the significance of evaluation criteria: equal and entropy weighting methods. The investigation has proven the practical suitability of the proposed tool in the problem of multi-criteria sustainable transport assessment. Furthermore, conducted analysis indicated that Sweden is characterized by the most sustainable transport in terms of significance and share of alternative fuels and RES and their diversification.