Uncertainty-Based Tradeoff Analysis Methodology for
Samuel Labi
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Methodology for Multicriteria Decision Making in Highway Asset Management
Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 2004
A methodology is proposed for multicriteria decision making involving trade-off analyses between candidate projects as well as project selection and programming in highway asset management under certainty, risk, and uncertainty. A set of system goals in highway asset management structure was first identified, and relative weights of the system goals were determined. Performance indicators under each goal were identified. Benefits achieved under various system goals as a result of implementing a project are typically measured with noncommensurable units; they need to be converted into nondimensional units so that trade-offs between projects can be measured under equal parameters. Where such conversion processes involve certainty and risk, this paper develops systemwide multiattribute utility functions for individual asset management programs to form the basis of trade-off analyses. Because of the limitation of utility theory for situations under uncertainty, an alternative approach b...
Multicriteria highway programming incorporating risk and uncertainty: A methodology for highway asset management system
Highway asset management is a systematic process that aims to preserve, expand, and operate highway assets in the most cost-effective manner. It is an analytical tool that facilitates organized, logical, and integrated decision-making in asset management practice. This study proposes a methodology for the development of a highway asset management system that addresses asset valuation, performance modeling, marginal benefit analysis, and multicriteria decision-making, including tradeoff analysis as well as project selection and programming. While most existing management systems deal with individual physical highway assets or system usage only under certainty or risk, this research focuses on the management of an entire highway network that also incorporates tradeoff decisions involving uncertainty. Systemwide multiattribute utility functions and standardized focus gain-over-loss ratio functions based on utility theory and Shackle's model, respectively, are calibrated using data collected through a series of questionnaire surveys. A system optimization model, along with a solution algorithm, is formulated to facilitate project selection and programming. A Highway Asset Management System software program is developed and utilized in a case study for systemwide project selection based on information for candidate projects proposed for state highway programming in Indiana during 1998-2001. For all given years and regardless of the tradeoff decision under certainty, risk, or uncertainty, the software outputs match with the results of actual highway programming at least 85 percent of the time. The case study results validate the proposed methodology and research findings and also reveal the advantages of using the algorithm for overall highway asset management practice.
Decision Methodology for Allocating Funds across Transportation Infrastructure Assets
Journal of Infrastructure Systems, 2006
One of the main activities in transportation infrastructure asset management is the allocation of available funds across infrastructure classes ͑e.g., pavements, bridges, signs͒ or programs ͑e.g., maintenance, construction͒. A methodology for allocating funds across transportation asset classes using multiattribute utility theory has been developed and is provided in this paper. This methodology can be used for performing trade-off analysis among asset classes where it is practical to consider potential shifts in funding from one class to another. The methodology was applied to a sample state highway network in Champaign County, Illinois. The sample highway network consists of pavements, bridges, culverts, signs, and intersections. Four funding allocation alternatives were evaluated using the developed methodology. The case study identified the funding allocation alternative that results in the lowest risk of infrastructure failure or poor performance ͑i.e., highest utility͒ from an experienced engineer standpoint. The utility analysis revealed that the decision maker in the case study is risk averse when managing infrastructure classes with the most potential to affect traffic safety and to be noticed by the public, such as bridges and intersections. The case study also revealed that the level of available funding and the level of infrastructure performance affect how the total funding is allocated among asset classes.
Trade-Off Analysis Approach for Multiobjective Transportation Investment Decision Making
Journal of Transportation Engineering, 2015
Transportation planning is multidimensional, complex, and dynamic in nature. The decision-making process often involves multiple stakeholders with conflicting preferences. Effective decision outcomes can only be reached by explicitly addressing such conflicts. Over the last several decades, optimization techniques have been used for project-selection decisions to achieve maximized overall returns on investments. The existing methods for project selection capable of conducting trade-off analyses mainly focus on assessing trade-offs between project construction time, duration, and cost, as well as swapping between transportation agency costs and user costs. However, they have largely not addressed impacts on the overall economic returns by changing a few important decision factors such as differentiating relative importance of various transportation performance goals and measures, and different types of highway facilities, and further relaxing the budget constraints by management programs dealing with physical facilities and system operations while keeping the total budget unchanged. This paper introduces a trade-off analysis approach that uses a multicommodity minimum-cost network (MMCN) model to establish traffic details for the transportation network needed for estimating the benefits of implementing a single project or multiple projects jointly, and a surrogate worth trade-off (SWT) method for multiobjective project selection based on the estimated project benefits. A computational study has revealed that the proposed trade-off approach can generate noninferior solutions and increase the total benefits by 18-20%.
Highway Transportation Project Evaluation and Selection Incorporating Risk and Uncertainty
Stochastic Optimization - Seeing the Optimal for the Uncertain, 2011
Optimal infrastructure management decisions under uncertainty
Transportation Research Part C: Emerging …, 1993
The planning of maintenance and rehabilitation activities for transportation facilities uses information on facility condition from two sources: measurement and forecasting. Both of these sources are characterized by the presence of significant uncertainties, which have important life-cycle cost implications. State-of-the-art decision-making models ignore the uncertainty either in one or both sources of information. This paper presents a methodology (the Latent Markov Decision Process) that explicitly recognizes the presence of random measurement errors in the measurement of facility condition. The methodology can also be used to quantify the "value of more precise information," which allows an agency to evaluate measurement technologies of different pmcisions and costs. A parametric study, which demonstrates such an evaluation in the case of highway pavements, is performed.
Updating and Improving Methodology for Prioritizing Highway Project Locations on the Strategic Intermodal System (SIS)
2016
The Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) District One developed the Congestion Management Process (CMP) system to prioritize low-cost, near-term highway improvements on the Strategic Intermodal System (SIS). The existing CMP system is designed to screen and prioritize all project locations based on seven performance measures that were adopted from FDOT's Strategic Investment Tool (SIT). The system also uses a simple scoring method to prioritize project locations. Since the development of the CMP in 2009, a number of new developments have taken place, including, but not limited to, the development of the 2060 Florida Transportation Plan (FTP), the publication of the Highway Safety Manual (HSM), and a new emphasis on freight transportation for economic development. At the same time, more advanced methods for identifying improvement locations and ranking projects have also become available. Accordingly, the main objective of this project is to research and update the existing performance measures and the project prioritization method in the CMP to better reflect the current conditions and strategic goals of FDOT. A second objective of the project is to develop visual mapping tools in the system. The final updated list of performance measures includes number of excess fatalities, number of excess injuries, volume-to-capacity ratio, average annual daily traffic (AADT) per lane, truck volume per lane, truck percent, and delay. The Analytic Network Process (ANP), an advanced multi-criteria decision-making technique, is implemented to prioritize highway project locations. Unlike the simple scoring method, the ANP does not give undue weight to a specific performance measure, and it can account for the interdependencies that usually exist in the performance measures. Furthermore, the ANP facilitates pairwise comparison of the project locations with respect to each of the performance measures. The new updated CMP system calculates the performance measures and implements the ANP approach to prioritize roadway segments. The system also has the capability to create thematic maps of performance measures and other input variables.
Multi‐objective decision‐making for road design
Transport, 2008
Multi‐objective analysis is a popular tool to solve many economic, managerial and construction problems. The objective of this research is to develop and implement a methodology for multi‐objective optimization of multi‐alternative decisions in road construction. After a rough overview of the articles dealing with the multi‐objective decision and assessment of road design alternatives described by discrete values, Multi‐Objective Optimization on the basis of the Ratio Analysis (MOORA) method was selected. This method focuses on a matrix of alternative responses on the objectives. A case study demonstrates the concept of multi‐objective optimization of road design alternatives and the best road design alternative is determined.
The CLIOSjre Process: A Flexible Multicriteria, Multistakeholder Decision Framework for Transportation Planning under Uncertainty
Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 2018
Transportation investments determine the long-term success or failure of a transportation provider. It is therefore vital for decision makers to have an in-depth understanding of the alternatives available before they choose to invest. However, often, the process of evaluating alternatives is lengthy, costly, and contentious, particularly for transportation infrastructure investment decisions that are large, complex, and interconnected with other economic development and sustainability goals. Furthermore, transportation investments involve many decision makers, each with different priorities and expertise. Therefore, there is a need for transparent, accurate, flexible, and practicable decision-making aids that can handle the complex challenges facing the decision-making bodies of transportation providers and planning organizations. This paper introduces a new decision aid—the CLIOSjre Process—that combines insights from multicriteria decision analysis, multistakeholder negotiation theory, and uncertainty analysis. The CLIOSjre Process helps decision makers compare multiple alternatives across multiple objectives and seek an informed collective transportation investment decision. Unlike other multicriteria decision aids, the CLIOSjre Process accounts for differences of opinion among decision makers and is designed to facilitate constructive negotiation among them. Finally, the CLIOSjre Process formally accounts for sources of uncertainty inherent in these decisions. In this way, the CLIOSjre Process provides a unique and flexible framework for investment analysis that can adapt to changes in transportation alternatives, decision-maker priorities, and emerging real-world conditions. The usefulness of this new decision aid is illustrated for the East Japan Railway Company’s consideration of a transportation investment opportunity in high-speed rail development on the Northeast Corridor of the United States.
Risk assessment: method and case study for traffic projects
Journal of Modern Transportation, 2017
A comprehensive project evaluation and decision-making method considering multiple objectives, stakeholders, and attributes of proposed traffic treatments is inherently complicated. Although individual techniques in evaluating operations, safety, economic, and stakeholder objectives are available, a practical method that integrates all these risk factors and their uncertainties into a multiattribute decision-making tool is absent. A three-level project decision-making process was developed to model and assess multiple-attribute risk in a proposed traffic treatment from the perspective of multiple stakeholders. The direct benefits from reducing delay and safety risk (basic objectives of traffic treatments) are computed in Level 1 with established methods. Feasibility and performance analysis in Level 2 examine site-specific constraints and conduct detailed performance analysis using advanced analysis tools. In Level 3, this paper introduces an innovative and integrated multiple attributes evaluation process under fuzziness and uncertainty (MAFU) process for evaluation and decision-making. The MAFU is a comprehensive and systematic assessment and decision-making procedure that can assess the magnitudes of project performance and to integrate conflicting interests and tradeoffs among stakeholders. A case study illustrates the application of MAFU for the selection of a traffic alternative involving several evaluation attributes and stakeholders. Results show that the MAFU produced the smallest variance for each alternative. With traditional cost-benefit evaluation methods, the uncertainty associated with performance of a traffic project in terms of operation, safety, environmental impacts, etc., is unrestricted and cumulative. Therefore, a reliable multi-attribute evaluation of complex traffic projects should not be made with conventional costbenefit analysis alone but with a process like MAFU.
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Trade-off Analysis Methodology for Asset Management
2008
In an era that is characterized by funding limitations, increased stakeholder participation, and the need for increased accountability and transparency, transportation agencies seek to ensure that comprehensive evaluation processes are identified and used for decision-making. Consistent with such processes is the incorporation of multiple performance criteria from different program areas, optimization of decisions under constrained budgets, and investigation of trade-offs between program areas, performance measures, budgetary levels, risk levels, and performance thresholds. To help INDOT carry out these processes, this study developed theoretical constructs for scaling and amalgamation of the different performance measures, and for analyzing the different kinds of trade-offs. The scaling of performance measures yields a consistent or dimensionless unit to make them comparable. Amalgamation combines the weighted and scaled performance measures to yield a single utility value that rep...
Multiple‐criteria decision support system in highway infrastructure management
Transport, 2008
Highway infrastructure represents a significant part of the public assets, and through its lifetime, is exposed to various deterioration processes leading to the depreciation of its value. It is therefore of vital importance to manage these assets aiming to reduce the loss of their value with time to a minimum. A typical task of road managers is making decisions related to maintenance, repair and rehabilitation based on data regarding the existing condition, risk of its use, life cycle costs and age. Road infrastructure is complex, and therefore the optimal choice of planned interventions is a delicate task often left to the road managers' subjective judgment. The main goal of research work presented in the paper is the development of a multiple criteria decision support system to determine the priority ranking of asset rehabilitation projects. Results are presented for a selected case study that consists of 27 overpasses for a highway section. The data on the condition of crossovers obtained by regular inspection along their contribution to a structured database are essential. The selection of the set of asset rehabilitation projects is carried out by using the developed decision support system that includes the budget constraint option. The selected set of asset maintenance/rehabilitation projects meets best the pre-defined combination of several criteria and therefore yields the maximized overall benefit. The results showing the selection criteria employed in the decision process and relative importance are crucial in obtaining the targeted goals. The selected criteria should therefore reflect the needs of the users and the actual conditions related to the assets.
Framework for Multiobjective Optimization of Physical Highway Assets Investments
Journal of transportation engineering, 2012
Optimization-based tools have been included in many engineering management systems for individual infrastructure asset classes such as pavement management systems (PMS) and bridge management systems (BMS). These tools typically include single-objective optimization analyses. However, real-world decisions concerning asset preservation and renewal often involve more than one objective reflecting the various goals of the agency and need to evaluate possible alternatives according to multiple criteria. Traditional single-objective optimization approaches for handling such situations optimize a selected most important objective while either neglecting the less important competing objectives or imposing them as known constraints in the optimization formulation. This approach often does not provide truly optimal solutions. Multiobjective optimization formulations have clear theoretical advantages but increase the complexity of the mathematical formulation. This paper presents a review of the application of multiobjective optimization techniques in various working levels of highway asset management. Some promising techniques for the different infrastructure management functions are identified, and relevant characteristics are summarized and compared. Based on the applications reviewed, it can be concluded that multiobjective optimization could be effective for supporting many infrastructure management business processes. The review also suggests that a synergistic integration of complementary techniques may help develop practical and efficient decision-supporting tools that take advantage of the benefits and avoid potential drawbacks of the individual techniques.
Uncertainty in transportation systems evaluation: issues and approaches
Transportation Planning and Technology, 1984
Highway improvement project selection by the joint consideration of cost-benefit and risk criteria
Journal of the Operational Research Society, 2013
ABSTRACT Since highway improvement project selection requires screening thousands of road segments with respect to crashes for further analysis and final project selection, we provide a two-step project selection methodology and describe an application case to demonstrate its advantages. In the first step of the proposed methodology, we will use odds against observing a given crash count, injury count, run-off road count and so on as measures of risk and a multi-criteria pre-selection technique with the objective to decrease the number of prospective improvement locations. In the second step, the final project selection is accomplished based on a composite efficiency measure of estimated cost, benefit and hazard assessment (odds) under budget constraints. To demonstrate the two-step methodology, we will analyze 4 years of accident data at 23,000 locations where the final projects are selected out of several hundred of potential locations.
Highway Project Level Life-Cycle Benefit/Cost Analysis under Certainty, Risk, and Uncertainty: Methodology with Case Study
Journal of Transportation Engineering, 2009
One of the key steps in the highway investment decision-making process is to conduct project evaluation. The existing project level life-cycle cost analysis approaches for estimating project benefits maintain limited capacity of probabilistic risk assessments of input factors such as highway agency costs, traffic growth rates, and discount rates. However, they do not explicitly address cases where those factors are under uncertainty with no definable probability distributions. This paper introduces an uncertainty-based methodology for highway project level life-cycle benefit/cost analysis that handles certainty, risk, and uncertainty inherited with input factors for the computation. A case study is conducted to assess impacts of risk and uncertainty considerations on estimating project benefits and on network-level project selection. First, data on system preservation and expansion, usage, and candidate projects for state highway programming are used to compute project benefits using deterministic, risk-based, and uncertainty-based analysis approaches, respectively. Then, the three sets of estimated project benefits are implemented in a stochastic optimization model for project selection. Significant differences are revealed with and without uncertainty considerations.
A Multi-Objective Decision-Making Framework for Transportation Investments
Journal of the Transportation Research Forum, 2010
Lifecycle Optimization and Tradeoff Analysis among competing objectives for a road corridor
While the philosophical motivation behind Civil Infrastructure Management Systems is to achieve optimal levels of service at a minimum cost, the allocation of scarce resources among dissimilar objectives and across networks is still a matter of debate. This paper presents a two stage optimization approach and objective function decomposition for conducting tradeoff analysis between safety (roads) and condition (bridges and roads) for a road corridor in New Brunswick. A road safety index based on potential for improvement was created. Road condition was based on roughness, rutting and cracking. Bridge condition was based on apparent age per subcomponent (deck, superstructure, and substructure). Two optimization analyses were conducted; one aimed to minimize overall cost while achieving sustainable results and another one used to identify a Pareto optimality solution. Classical Dominance and suggested performance driven analysis were combined to identify and select the Pareto Optimal ...
Cross-asset prioritization model for transportation projects using multi-attribute utility theory: a case study
2022
The Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21), enacted by the US Congress in 2012, establishes seven national infrastructure performance goals that must be considered during funding allocation procedures by state transportation agencies (STAs). These goals' wide range of aspects creates situations where STAs have to deal with conflicting objectives without formal trade-off mechanisms, forcing them to make investments that might be difficult to justify to stakeholders. Moreover, STAs strive to create standard performance metrics that allow the comparison of investment alternatives among different groups of assets. This paper presents a case study on applying a Multi-Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT) model to make trade-offs among conflicting objectives in different types of transportation construction projects. The case study was conducted on ten construction projects executed by the Iowa Department of Transportation. The case study shows how the proposed MAUT model can be used as an objective mechanism to prioritize infrastructure projects across asset classes to provide the necessary justification for infrastructure policy decision-making.
Integrated asset management framework: using risk-based decision-support systems to manage ancillary highway assets
2015
for their continuous enlightening contributions and critiques in shaping the final work. My sincere gratitude also goes to the entire faculty of Transportation Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology for their support throughout my study. I would also want to acknowledge my research group members, the Infrastructure Research Group (IRG), for their open discussions in informing my work; especially, Janille Smith-Colin for being an extra editing eye, spending her whole weekend to review my draft. Without the support of State Departments of transportation providing me with data for the analysis, this work wouldn't have seen any progress. For this reason, I would like to thank the Oregon State, Washington State, and New York State departments of transportation for supplying all the data I needed. In addition, I would like to thank my mother, sisters, and brother for their prayers and support during my studies. Lastly, but certainly not the least, to my three beautiful ladies in my life, my wife Hirut and daughters Ronia and Jozy, thank you for your encouragement, patience, understanding, and support during all the periods that I have been away.
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