Rail Projects Ranking Under Fuzzy Environment. Serbian Rail Projects Case Study

Project ranking in public sector is a complex issue, encompassing significant investments, restricted budgets, numerous stakeholders, conflicting relevant criteria, as well as great impact of the current state government and politics. We suggest a hybrid two-stage framework for rail projects ranking by incorporating interval-valued fuzzy (IVF) sets with AHP and TOPSIS methods. IVF sets are an extension of traditional fuzzy sets, and offer better description of uncertainty and imprecision than traditional fuzzy sets. Based on the provided framework, the rail projects ranking model is developed and tested on the real rail projects relevant for Pan-European rail Corridor 10 through Serbia. Sensitivity analysis demonstrated that the proposed framework is relatively sensitive on criteria fuzzy weights change, and provided the measure of the sensitivity for each alternative. The proposed framework can be easily and effectively applied to MCDM problems from various fields characterized with vague and imprecise information and high complexity of the problem. It represents a valuable decision support tool for rail managers, but also for engineers, government and/or relevant ministry, and other relevant interest groups.