Selection of sustainable urban transportation alternatives using an integrated intuitionistic fuzzy Choquet integral approach

Unrestrained urban development and rapid expansion of motorized vehicles inevitably lead to unsustainable transportation systems from economic, social and environmental points of view, not only endangering public health but also pressuring ecosystems. Trying to address these issues, transportation policy makers face major challenges in their attempts to identify sustainable transportation alternatives. To provide a systematic approach for such endeavors, this paper evaluates different public bus technologies as urban transportation alternatives. In order to incorporate expert opinion into the model environment, a set of sustainability related criteria is established and expert opinion regarding the sustainability of vehicle options are obtained based on each criterion. Since the fulfillment of a single criterion is not sufficient to deduct meaningful conclusions, the evaluation considered the dependencies among the decision criteria in search of compromising solutions. To address this, an aggregation method based on Intuitionistic Fuzzy Choquet Integral (IFCI) and Group Decision Making (GDM) techniques is proposed. A fuzzy pairwise-comparison measure identification method is used in IFCI in order to define its parameters. TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution), another multi-criteria method that ignores interactions, and 2-additive Choquet integral are also employed. The outcomes of IFCI, 2-additive Choquet integral and TOPSIS are compared with one another. The findings indicate that dependencies among decision criteria significantly affect the selection process of the most sustainable urban transportation system and can alter the rankings.