Author(s)

R. Abbyad & I. Kaysi

Abstract

The Ministry of Transport of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is in the process of developing a methodology for the prioritization of proposed primary and secondary road projects in the Kingdom. This process was carried out using a multi-criteria analysis model. The model, called the Saudi Road Prioritization model (SaRoP model), consists of a linear additive model where the overall performance of a proposed road project is measured by the sum of its weighted performance on a set of criteria. With such a model, a low performance of the project on one criterion may be offset by a high performance on another. The degree of compensation between the criteria is determined by the relative weights. These weights are derived using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) developed by Saaty. Ministry experts and KSA academics, as well as international consultants, were asked to fill out a questionnaire, which consists of providing their pair-wise comparisons of all criteria within a certain level of the hierarchy. The results indicated the importance that decision-makers and experts place on socio-economic development and the improvement of the transportation network over other criteria. In order to reach these results the data was organized according to consistency and homogeneity and a set of weights was derived by checking the results from several different computational models. This paper describes the research and weighting methodology of the decision-making model. It is concluded that AHP is a useful and efficient tool for organizing priorities and aggregating decisions. Keywords: analytic hierarchy process, multi-criteria analysis, linear additive model, consistency ratio, aggregation of individual preferences, aggregation of individual judgements, vector space AHP, singular value decomposition AHP.

Keywords

analytic hierarchy process, multi-criteria analysis, linear additivemodel, consistency ratio, aggregation of individual preferences, aggregation ofindividual judgements, vector space AHP, singular value decomposition AHP