Multicriteria analysis to compare the impact of alternative road corridors: a case study in northern Italy

Abstract

The analysis and comparison of a set of project alternatives implies balancing the different impact types so as to reach an evaluation of the merit of each alternative. Multicriteria analysis (MCA) proved to be useful for this kind of assessment by providing a framework to integrate the available information about the impacts with the values and preferences of stakeholders and decision-makers. This paper presents a case study in which MCA was applied to achieve a suitability ranking of the alternative land corridors that were proposed to host a road development within an alpine valley in northern Italy.

Keywords:

• multicriteria analysis
• sensitivity analysis
• road corridor