Testing a New Methodology to Assess Urban Freight Systems through the Analytic Hierarchy Process

Decision-making models often deal with problems that involve multiple criteria analysis in order to assess alternatives in various decision-making settings. On the basis of a systematic process, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) has recently been recognized as a proven decision-making tool in a wide variety of fields. However, new methods to cope with evolving or scaled problems are emerging in the search of enhanced flexibility and accuracy. Under an AHP perspective, in this article a methodology to experimentally assess urban freight systems is proposed and tested. This approach is applied to validate an existing methodology, the Urban Freight Transport Index (UFTI), as a potential evaluation alternative. The statistic used to perform the testing procedure was the Pearson's correlation. Results indicating a good linearity between AHP and UFTI methodologies, suggesting that mathematical errors may reflect an accepted subjective situation, but that this is not due to the tested method itself. Therefore, it is concluded that the methodology used to design the Urban Freight Transport Index offers new assessing possibilities that might be extrapolated to multicriteria dynamic problems, as a way to produce useful general indexes in distinct disciplines.