Chapters authored
An Integrated Approach of Strategic Planning and Multi-Criteria Analysis to Evaluate Transport Strategies in Railway Network
This chapter presents a methodology for selecting transport strategy for railway passenger transport development. The strategic planning, as Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental (PESTLE) analysis and Strengths - Weaknesses – Opportunities - Threats (SWOT) analysis integrated with Multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) have been applied as a tool to make decision. The proposed methodology consists five stages. The first stage formulates the alternatives of the policies for railway manager. The criteria in each PESTLE group have been defined in the second step. The total number of 24 criteria has been studied. In third stage, the SIMUS method based on linear programming has been applied to rank the alternatives and assess the criteria in PESTLE groups. The fourth stage represents the ranking by application the different multi0criteria approaches as distance based, utility based and outranking methods to make decision. The combination the PESTLE analysis with SWOT analysis for strategic planning is done in the fifth stage. The integration of the PESTLE with technical, economic, technological and environmental (TETE) analysis in presented. The application of methodology has been demonstrated with an example for Bulgarian railway network. Three strategies of railway transport development have been evaluated and compared. It was found that the most important are the political (0.29), social (0.25) and technological (0.25) groups in PESTLE analysis.
Part of the book: Railway Transport Planning and Management