A Novel Evaluation and Decision-Making Approach to Prioritizing the Service Quality Criteria in Road Transportation Systems

The passengers’ expectations of road transportation systems' service quality lead transportation policy-makers to determine the technical requirements to meet these expectations. It means that Road trip Designs (RDs) as technical requirements should be translated based on Road users’ Requirements (RRs) as passengers’ expectations. We classified the RRs and RDs to 8 and 10 requirements, respectively. The Quality Function Deployment (QFD) method can translate the RRs to RDs in road transportation systems. On the one hand, due to the inherent uncertainty in decision-makers viewpoints in such systems, the Fuzzy QFD (FQFD) can be applied as a more accurate translation of RRs to RDs. On the other hand, the Evidential Reasoning (ER) approach, as one of the best evidence-based decision analysis methods, deals with the raised ambiguity and chaos by decision makers’ viewpoints. Accordingly, a novel hybrid FQFD-ER approach to prioritize the service quality criteria in road transportation systems has been provided in this paper. Moreover, a novel mathematical lemma is provided to hybridize and link the decision-making approaches of the FQFD and ER. Considering the weights of decision makers and fuzzy trapezoidal numbers to achieve the better results are other innovations of this paper. Totally, this study aims to integrate the FQFD with the ER approach to prioritize the RDs based on RRs in related road transportation systems to the Arba'een ceremony as a real case study. The obtained results by hybrid FQFD-ER revealed that the suitable road lanes in terms of width and number mostly improve the service quality.