An AHP-based method to assess the introduction of electric cars in a public administration

The adoption of electric vehicles in an organization's fleet can provide an emission-free urban transport, but such decision must be assessed from different perspectives (e.g. economic, environmental, social, etc.), particularly when there are multiple goals and stakeholders. The article presents a multiple criteria evaluation method which can be applied to support the decision on the adoption of electric cars by a public administration. The method has two main phases: analysis by indicators and multi-criteria analysis. The first phase can provide analytic results for each category of indicators, but the values are treated only in a disaggregate way and not summarized in a global indicator. Thus the multi-criteria methodology can provide an overall assessment of the alternatives based on the aggregation of the values obtained for all criteria (i.e. indicators). In summary, the goal of the method is to employ several indicators to measure the expected effects and synthesize them in an overall judgement, taking into consideration the different stakeholders points of view. The case study presented in the paper is an application of the structured evaluation method to the university fleet. The fleet consists of 24 cars with an average of only 5700 kilometres travelled. The indicators have been classified according to different impact areas: Economy, Energy, Environment, Society.