Title: Weighting the urban public transport system quality index (UPTQI) using the analytical hierarchy process

Authors: Irina Pticina; Irina Yatskiv

Addresses: Department of Software Engineering, Transport and Telecommunication Institute, Riga, Lomonosova 1, Latvia ' Department of Mathematical Methods and Modelling, Transport and Telecommunication Institute, Riga, Lomonosova 1, Latvia

Abstract: The problem of estimating the quality of public transport service is multidimensional if considering it in terms of data and one of the approaches to assess it is aggregating the set of indicators into a single index or composite indicator. The key task in constructing above mentioned index is estimation of weights coefficients for quality indicators. There are different methods for solving this task. This work presents an application of analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to assess weights coefficients values for developing the urban public transport system service quality index (UPTQI). The results of this approach application are compared with the results of authors' previous studies, where the weights were estimated on the basis the principal component analysis and on the benefit of the doubt approach. The article provides a numerical example of the UPTQI calculation for 62 European cities based on real data.

Keywords: urban transport; public transport; service quality indicators; weighting; analytical hierarchy process; AHP; principal component analysis; PCA; Europe.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSSS.2015.069739

International Journal of Society Systems Science, 2015 Vol.7 No.2, pp.107 - 126

Published online: 30 May 2015 *

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