Proposing a new hybrid multi-criteria decision-making approach for road maintenance prioritization

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a hybrid multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method, by combining the AHP, ELECTRE II, ELECTRE III, ELECTRE IV and Copeland techniques for road maintenance prioritization, in which the roads are evaluated and ranked based on various criteria. The proposed method is applied to four streets in Tehran, as a case study. Design/methodology/approach: First, a set of criteria for road maintenance was determined and their weights were obtained using the AHP method. Four streets in Tehran, Iran were considered as alternatives and prioritized using the ELECTRE II, ELECTRE III and ELECTRE IV methods. Finally, the results of employing the three methods were integrated using the Copeland method and a final result was obtained. Findings: The findings of the study suggested that “road safety” is the most important criterion in maintenance and “traffic volume” and “pavement quality index (PCI)” have the second and third rank in importance. Moreover, “The width of the street” is the least important criterion in road maintenance. Additionally, the streets' final ranking was obtained using the proposed method. Research limitations/implications: The proposed method helps managers effectively assign their limited budget and resources to roads with higher maintenance priority and as the result, increase the roads efficiency. Originality/value: In this research, eight main criteria were collected using previous researches and experts' opinions. Also, a new combination of different MCDM techniques is proposed in this research.