Multi-criteria decision making for locating multimodal transfer nodes in passenger transport systems

Mega cities around the world are highly concerned about the impacts of urban transportation. It is very frequently to find multiple actors from both private and public sectors involved in the design and operation of urban passenger transportation systems to make decisions that seek at optimising their own particular objectives. Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques actually aid this process. In this paper, we consider the problem of locating passenger transfer nodes for an Integrated Public Passenger Transport System (IPPTS) that is mainly based on the use of a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) network. The objective of this paper is to present an application of the Analytic Hierarchy Technique (AHP) to solve the problem. A feature of this study is that, in addition to traditional economic and logistic criteria, environmental and social criteria not previously evaluated in the literature are included. Results show that multi-criteria approaches are very promising for solving this challenging problem.