Multicriteria sustainability evaluation of transport networks for selected European countries

Abstract

As an essential economic activity, transportation has complex interactions with the environment and society. Since the concept of sustainable development has become one of the top priorities for nations, there has been a growing interest in evaluating the performance of transport systems with respect to sustainability issues. The main purpose of this study is to introduce a decision making framework to assess the sustainability of the transport networks in a multidimensional setting and a technique to identify non-compromise alternatives. We also propose an elucidation technique to identify according to which criteria a system needs to be improved and how much improvement is required to attain a certain level of sustainability. The proposed methods are applied to a set of selected European countries within a case study.