Decision Making Support System: The Multicriteria Analysis Application and New Model

The problem of adopting a valid criterion to compare different projects in the field of transportation, each alternative to the others, is considerably debated by technicians and scholars in the field . Numerous experiences and a great deal of research in Europe and the USA have underlined shortcomings in the technical-economic methods of analysis traditionally employed in public sector choices, such as the limited transparency for the decision maker, the risk of obtaining inefficient results, the difficulty of keeping all the possible goals in mind, and the complexity of managing all the relevant information's. The researchers conducted by the TTL Research Unit have dealt both with cost benefit and Multicriteria analysis. The latter one has been deepen in order to identify a process that, within the limits of general theory, would minimize the use of value judgments in normalizing the measurement of goals and in choosing the preferable solution to the problem under consideration and the individual internal priorities. Consequently, a mathematical formulation has been developed and a software (coded in APL - "A Programming Language", Ken Iverson - IBM 19601) has been implemented. Accordingly with this model, the feasibility of a new high-speed railway line in south of Italy has been analyzed to verify both the feasibility and the conditions that influence the results.