Multicriteria Group Decision-Making Technique for a Low-Class Road Maintenance Program

Abstract

Low-class roads substantially differ from main roads in terms of extensiveness, databank availability, and profitability, which stresses the need for an extraordinarily sophisticated decision-making mechanism for maintenance programs. However, road transportation decision-making administrators in third-world countries such as Iran are occasionally neither well educated in their area of activity nor especially eager to benefit from specialist advice. This usually leads to costly errors in the process of individual decision making. One way to obviate these grave errors could be to incorporate group decision-making techniques into the administrative agenda. The combined Conference-Delphi-analytic hierarchy process (AHP) model employed here to prioritize the low-class roads in Gilan for maintenance, improvement, and upgrading, profoundly incorporates specialist advice and could serve as a counteracting approach in this regard. The preliminary procedures including the Conference and the Delphi survey were employed to determine the list of the specialists for the AHP and the criteria which were then fed into the AHP. The results indicate a significant contrast between conventional individualistic decisions and those made through incorporating systematic specialist comments using our model.