Establishing the Weights of Performance Criteria: Case Studies in Transportation Facility Management

Abstract

Transportation management policies and practices are currently experiencing evolving trends such as funding limitations, aging facilities, greater travel demand, increased number of visible stakeholders, and higher user expectations. As a result, transportation agencies currently grapple with how to best incorporate a wide range of performance criteria in investment evaluation and decision making. Often, a key prerequisite to multiple criteria decision making is to establish the relative importance of different performance criteria as perceived by decision makers, facility users, and other stakeholders. This paper reviews methods that exist in the literature for weighting and illustrates the applications of some of these methods. For the bridge management case study, the direct-questioning weighting technique was found to yield results that indicated high levels of agreement among bridge experts. For the overall highway asset management case study, the analytical hierarchy process was used to derive the weights across performance criteria. The findings show that the distribution of weights across various highway performance criteria based on the agency perspective can differ from that based on the road users’ perspective. The relative weights of the different performance criteria can help agencies establish the overall combined desirability or otherwise of each alternative transportation action in terms of all performance criteria, identify the best action in a balanced and rational manner, or analyze trade-offs between the alternative actions.