Two-phase model for multi-criteria project ranking: Serbian Railways case study

An original two-phase model for ranking railway projects from different railway subsystems is presented. The model was developed for the purpose of ranking 75 Serbian Railways projects. The advantage of this model over existing one-phase models is that it allows for one to obtain not only a unique ranking list of all of the projects but also ranking lists for individual project clusters. The second essential advantage is that the application of this model eliminates the shortcoming of some of the high-ranked projects on the unique ranking list not being high-ranked on the cluster ranking list. Due to the frequency of situations in which projects contain a dualism of interests (e.g., local-global, individual-general, regional-national and national-European), based on the proposed model, a universal model for a two-phase ranking of projects was developed. The algorithm of the new model is presented herein.