EVALUATING INVESTMENTS TO IMPROVE THE SAFETY OF URBAN PROVINCIAL ROADS: A HIERARCHICAL MULTI-ATTRIBUTE APPROACH

This paper describes a multi-attribute analysis that, when considering a set of urban provincial roads which are important from a safety standpoint, supports the decision-maker in choosing which ones to focus on as a priority. The decision-making support model considers and summarises the main parameters required to establish the criticality of the situations under consideration from the point of view of road safety. This model has some distinctive features when compared to those previously published in the literature: a) it follows an original and simplified procedure to calculate the weights attributed to the criteria – this is based on the approach proposed by Simos (1990) and refined by Figueira and Roy (2002); b) it improves the robustness of the rankings by using the Monte Carlo simulation on sets of weights determined by a panel of experts; c) it is easy for technicians to use. The analyses performed on a case study have shown that the evaluations obtained using the model are consistent with real-world situations. Furthermore, the Monte Carlo simulations have confirmed the robustness of the rankings with respect to the variability of the evaluations provided by experts. The proposed method can be easily developed and/or modified in order to evaluate other types of road.