Fuzzy multicriteria analysis for performance evaluation of bus companies

This paper presents an effective fuzzy multicriteria analysis (MA) approach to performance evaluation for urban public transport systems involving multiple criteria of multilevel hierarchies and subjective assessments of decision alternatives. The subjectiveness and imprecision of the evaluation process are modeled as fuzzy numbers by means of linguistic terms. To avoid the complex and unreliable comparison of fuzzy numbers, typically required by fuzzy MA models, the concept of the degree of optimality of each alternative with respect to each criterion is used to transform a weighted fuzzy performance matrix into a fuzzy singleton matrix. Incorporated with the decision maker's attitude towards risk, a crisp overall performance index is obtained for each alternative based on the concept of the ideal solution. The approach presented is computationally efficient, and its underlying concepts are simple and comprehensible. A case study on 10 bus companies of an urban public transport system in Taiwan is conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the approach.