Temporal VIKOR - A New MCDA Method Supporting Sustainability Assessment

Sustainability is a widely incorporated trend into national policies. It implies developing metrics and indicators to measure sustainability. It is evidenced by the development of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), included in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development proposed by the United Nations (UN). A framework with a complete set of indicators requires a tool including all objectives simultaneously, such as Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methods. Due to the dynamic nature of sustainable development, a static MCDA approach to evaluating current performance is insufficient. Therefore, this paper proposes a framework with a newly developed method called the Temporal VIKOR and measurement of data variability that allows aggregation of alternatives’ efficiency over investigated time. The practical application of this framework is presented in the temporal assessment of sustainable cities and communities concerning the UN’s SDG 11 frame. The results prove the proposed framework’s potential usefulness for sustainability assessment information systems

TOWARDS RELIABLE DECISION-MAKING IN THE GREEN URBAN TRANSPORT DOMAIN

Operational research is a scientific discipline related to the decision theory that allows determining solutions for specific problems related to, for example, widely understood transport. Increasingly popular in this field are issues related to the domain of the green urban transport. In order to support the decision-making process in this area, methods of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) are used more and more often. However, if we solve a specific problem using different MCDA methods, we get different rankings, as each method has a different methodological basis. Therefore, the challenge is how to make a reliable decision. This paper presents a numerical example from the green urban transport domain, which is solved by six different MCDA methods that return a complete ranking. We measure the similarity of these rankings using coefficients rw and WS, and then we propose a simple way of determining a compromise solution. The obtained compromise ranking is guaranteed to be the best match to the selected MCDA methods' rankings, which is proved in the paper. Finally, possible directions for further development work are identified