Toplu taşıma türü seçiminde simülasyon destekli analitik hiyerarşi yaklaşımı

Critical decisions that are taken at the stage of planning new transportation investments or improving present transportation systems usually turn out to be selecting one alternative among others. The most important condition in transport mode selection is to make a comparison between different alternatives. This comparison stage is perhaps the most precision-requiring stage in the transport mode selection process. The comparison process has many difficulties. The foremost difficulty is to decide on the factors to be included in the comparison. Some of these factors are quantitative or are capable of being quantified; many others are qualitative. Evaluation of the qualitative factors requires experience and enforces the correct jurisdictions. Therefore, defining the comparison process with just a quantitative model is not meaningful. Accordingly, expressing the results of the comparison analysis with just a single quantitative value would not be accurate. One of the important problems in comparing investment alternatives come out in including the some criteria that cannot be expressed numerically in the analysis. These kinds of criteria are either incorrectly quantified and included in the analysis or they are being tried to be evaluated verbally. In this study, one of the methods that are developed for including both numerical and nonnumeric criteria in the evaluation, the analytical hierarchy method is used. This method is supported by a travel time simulation model; and an application that can be useful in public transport mode selection is made. When deciding on a new investment that is going to be made within an urban public transport system, several criteria, which expand over a broad scale, should be taken into consideration. Since they make non-numerical important factors considerable, using multiple criteria decision making processes will be more meaningful in selecting a public transport mode. Analytical hierarchy method, which is one of multiple criteria decision making methods, is used in this study. This method provides meaningful results because of its simplicity and its ability to be adopted for different conditions. For evaluating some of the varying physical conditions, a simulation model is developed and used. Thus, the proposed method can be called a simulation supported analytic hierarchy method. Forecasting the possible performance of a public transport mode in a corridor has numerous benefits. It is important to forecast the performance in order to make accurate decisions on factors like vehicle frequency, station places and station spacing and in deciding between more than one alternative. The varying performance of a public transport based on characteristics like varying passenger demand, speed, station spacing and boarding/alighting time (according to payment type and other physical factors) system can be forecasted with the help of a simulation model. Such a simulation model is developed in this study. The performance indicator in the model is travel time. The model is run separately for busway and tram systems. In this study, two different examples for an urban corridor on which a public transport system will be built were taken into consideration. The alternatives of “busway” and “tram” were evaluated in the two examples, which are the Beşiktaş-Levent and Taksim- Aksaray corridors. As stated above, the analytical hierarchy method was utilised in deciding on the public transport alternative. In the analytical hierarchy method, first, the weights (w) of each alternative and each criterion should be estimated. A survey was organised in order to receive the experts’ opinions. After assessing the expert opinions gathered through the survey, relative weights of each criterion was determined. In the following step, the weights of each criterion for each of the public transport alternatives were estimated. For quantitative criteria, information from different sources was used; while for non-quantitative criteria, the second part of the survey was utilised. The weights of the criteria at the lower level of the hierarchy, which was defined by the analytical hierarchy method, were estimated for busway and tram alternatives through the method explained above. In the following step, these weights were multiplied by the criteria’s own weights that are placed in the middle level of the hierarchy. The results for each alternative were then summed up in order to find a total weight for each alternative. The results show that the relative weight of the busway is slightly higher than that of the tram’s. With the analytical hierarchy method, the busway is found out to be a more preferable option than the tram.