Fuzzy Multiple-Criteria Decision-Making for Railway planning

The paper presents a fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approachfor evaluating decision alternatives involving subjective judgements. In traditionalmodelling situations, variables are generally measured on an unambiguous scale.However in a multiple-criteria situation, where verbal responses are elicited fromrespondents and are used as evaluation metrics, there is a need to systematicallycope with linguistic expressions that may be nuanced or have double or even triplemeanings. Fuzzy set theory provides the mathematical technique for the systematichandling of imprecise data, for example overlapping responses such as “much greaterthan”, “greater than”, “approximately equal to” and so on. Fuzzy set analysisprovides therefore another dimension to multiple criteria scaling and can be usedas an alternative to some of the regular MCA approaches such as AHP or Regimeanalysis. This paper outlines an evaluation-framework which integrates fuzzy logicwith multi-criteria decision-making in the context of an infrastructural project. Thefunctionality of the proposed methodology is verified by analyzing a real decisionalproblem connected to the planning and construction of a new railway link.